Re: process to discover and adopt/adapt relationships

Hi John, besides the tools and approaches cited by Mathieu, for  
ontology and method reuse there is a community portal,  
ontologydesignpatterns.org [1], recently started within the NeOn  
project, which is collecting best practices; by now, only the content  
modeling practices has been opened, but several others (e.g. for  
logical, reengineering, process modeling practices) will be launched  
soon.

The portal is built on top of Semantic MediaWiki and Semantic Forms,  
and we have implemented a new extension, EvaluationWikiFlow, which  
allows to semantically annotate the collaborative evaluation and  
recommendation process for the proposed best practices.

Ontology design patterns are described in several deliverables [2],  
papers [3][4], and a full training course [5].

Your question is excellent and points directly to the core of actual  
reusability of ontologies. Our way of dealing with that is to make  
reusable ontologies small, recommended, specializable, and tightly  
linked to competency questions.

If you're interested, join the community and start contributing/reusing!
Best
Aldo

[1] http://www.ontologydesignpatterns.org
[2] http://www.neon-project.org/web-content/index.php?view=weblink&catid=17%3Aproject-reports&id=139%3Ad251-a-library-of-ontology-design-patterns&option=com_weblinks&Itemid=73
[3] http://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~dirk/modularity/papers/gangemi-05.pdf
[4] http://wiki.loa-cnr.it/index.php/Image:ERPaperODP.pdf
[5] http://ontologydesignpatterns.org/wiki/Training:NeOn_2008_Tutorial_on_Computational_Ontologies

Il giorno 11/mar/09, alle ore 02:39, John Graybeal ha scritto:

> I have a question of 'best practice' (uh oh).
>
> When you need an ontology for a purpose (like creating a controlled  
> set of terms to describe a domain area, let's say for  
> authoritatively populating a drop-down list), there are two stages  
> of work: (1) Find what exists. [2] If what exists doesn't fit the  
> need, subset or expand it.
>
> For step [1], I go to Watson and Swoogle and Google-('.owl' only),  
> enter some appropriate search terms, and try to weed through the  
> morass of sources that result, eliminating mail lists and other  
> irrelevancies.
>
> What else should I be doing to have a reasonable shot at finding the  
> almost perfect, already existing ontology?
>
> [2] Now, inevitably, there are many ontologies that have some piece  
> of what I want, and a few that have way more than what I want.  Now  
> what?  I can (a) piece together parts of each ontology (means  
> importing them all?), (b) use one of the mother-of-all-ontologies or  
> vocabularies (cyc, wordnet, others?) as is (means importing the  
> whole thing?), (c) create a new ontology that associates concepts to  
> those in other ontologies (either sameAs or more subtle  
> relationships), or (d) some combination of the above.
>
> It looks to me like if I want to provide a specific list of terms,  
> that don't overlap, have clear definitions, are unambiguous, and  
> fill the domain space, I will almost always have to create that  
> entire list on my own (then I can map it to other concepts if I want  
> to be a good boy).
>
> Even if I find a very solid ontology that meets these criteria,  
> inevitably it has more or fewer concepts than I want to show the  
> users of my ontology. So presenting just the right variation of the  
> ontology requires...another ontology.  (I guess extension can be  
> done by importing, and adding the few extra terms. But subsetting  
> seems awkward, unless one can import and _deprecate_ a few terms?)
>
> Is there something fundamental I've missed in the best practices and  
> technologies that people are using for this use case?  Or are we  
> inevitably in a world full of duplications, possibly with some  
> extensions and specializations?
>
> John
>
> --------------
> John Graybeal   <mailto:graybeal@mbari.org>  -- 831-775-1956
> Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute
> Marine Metadata Interoperability Project: http://marinemetadata.org
>
>


_________________________________

Aldo Gangemi

Senior Researcher
Semantic Technology Lab (STLab)
Institute for Cognitive Science and Technology
National Research Council (ISTC-CNR)
Via Nomentana 56, 00161, Roma, Italy

Tel: +390644161535
Fax: +390644161513
aldo.gangemi@cnr.it

http://www.stlab.istc.cnr.it
http://www.istc.cnr.it/createhtml.php?nbr=71
icq# 108370336

skype aldogangemi

Received on Thursday, 12 March 2009 00:21:22 UTC