Semantic Interoperation of IS through Formalized Social Processes Christophe Debruyne and Robert Meersman
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Introduction
Information systems (IS) on the Web are in general developed and maintained autonomously
For IS to interoperate, an ontology is needed – Agreement among all the stakeholders – Ontologies evolve while the agreements are developed – Ontologies are an externalization of the semantics outside an IS
Ontology Engineering (OE) is a critical activity
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Contribution
We discuss the social processes involved in ontology engineering and the role of natural language descriptions
We present a method and formalism to structure these
We developed a prototype that supports the method
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Method
Use of structured NL – Vehicle to elicit useful and
relevant concepts from community communication – Mapping of these social processes to evolutionary process of
the emerging ontology
In conceptualizations, rigorously separate facts from all application specific interpretations – Interpretations are performed by constraining the mapping
between application systems and the fact base of the ontology
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Method
DOGMA Ontology Descriptions <, ci, K>
– a lexon base, a finite set of plausible binary fact types called lexons <, t1, r1, r2, t2> <Vendor Community, Offer, has, is of, Title>
– ci a partial function mapping context-identifiers and terms to concepts
– K a finite set of ontological commitments containing – A selection of lexons – A mapping from application symbols to ontology terms – Predicates over those terms and roles to express constraints
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Context-identifiers, pointers to a community
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Method
Example of a commitment
Ω-RIDL: Verheyden et al. (SWDB 2004), Trog et al. (RuleML 2007)
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Method
The hybrid aspect of ontologies – Ontologies are resources shared among humans working in a
community, and (networked) systems – Mapping of terms to a concept is the result of a community
agreement – Capture those agreements, turn comunities into first class
citizens of the ontology, resulting notion called hybrid ontology – Fundamental technology: formalized glossaries, special linguistic
resources to support the agreement process
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Method Hybrid Ontology Description (HOD) =<,G>
– is a DOGMA Ontology Description – The contexts in are called communities – G is a glossary, a triple with components
– Gloss, a set of linguistic, human-interpretable glosses – g1, mapping community-term pairs to glosses – g2, mapping lexons to glosses
⟨VCard Community, Email Address⟩ à “The address of an email, a system of world-wide electronic communication in which a user can compose a message at one terminal that can be regenerated at the recipient’s terminal when the recipient logs in”
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Method
Glossaries – Glossary coherence: descriptions of lexons imply the description
of its terms – Glossary consistence: for every two community-term pairs, if
those terms are described with the same gloss, then the communities involved should agree that they refer to the same concept – The converse does not necessarily hold – Too strong a constraint to be practical
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Method
Glossaries – Term-equivalence EQT. Given communities 1, 2 and term t,
we say that the two term glosses g1(1,t)=gloss1 and g1(2,t)=gloss2 are term-equivalent if any two communities agree that the given term refers to the same concept for both
– Community-equivalence EQ. Given community and two terms t1, t2, we say that the two term glosses g1(,t1)=gloss1 and g1(,t2)=gloss2 are community-equivalent if that community agrees that the described terms refer to the same concept.
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Method
Glossaries – Term adoption. We say that community 1 adopts community-
term pair <2,t> iff – g1(1,t)=gloss1 and g1(2,t)=gloss2 are defined – EQT(gloss1,gloss2) they first “match” the two glosses – ci(1,t)=ci(2,t) they agree that both concepts are equal
– Term adoption is an assymetrical property
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Method
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Method
Social Processes
Business Semantics Management: De Leenheer et al. Computers in Industry 2010
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Method
Social Processes – Scope: create motivation, scope problem, add/remove members,
propose resources – Create: request to add lexon, request to add constraint – Refine: request to remove lexon, request to remove constraint,
request to change supertype of term, request to change lexon hierarchy
– Articulate: request to add/remove/change gloss, request to add/remove synonym
– At any time: request for edit/peer review/information/help, comment and reply
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Method Implementation of the ontology
OWL, RDF(S), …
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Method Externalizations/Re-internalization
– Commitments in the feed back loop – Commitments provide valuable information on how members
commit to the ontology – Used to generate queries to guide the dialogue in achieving
agreement Onto-Clippy!
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Tool
First version built in Collibra’s tool suite for ontology engineering – http://www.collibra.com/ – Built around XWiki technology
Second version built as a web application – Built to be driven by social processes – Follows the proposed formalism
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Tool (old)
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Experiment
45 students, 3 communities: – Vendors – Request for Proposals (RFP) – Product (common for both)
Goal à reach agreement within and across communities to exchange data
Results led to refinement of the ideas and a new
version of the prototype.
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Discussion oriented
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Method
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Conclusions
We discussed the social processes involved in ontology engineering and the role of natural language descriptions
We presented a method and formalism to structure these
We developed a prototype that supports the method
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Future Work
Additional experiments – Open Semantic Cloud for Brussels (http://www.oscb.be/) – TAS3 Trusted Architecture for Securely Shared Services
Identification of more operators on glosses and concepts
Capturing the types of agreements
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Questions?