From LoaWiki

ESWC 2008 Tutorial on Pattern-based Ontology Design (Full day)

The content of this tutorial has been developed with the support of the NeOn project

Venue. Sheraton La Caleta Resort & Spa, C/ La Enramada, Polígono 9 38670 Costa Adeje Tenerife, Islas Canarias Spain

Presenters: Aldo Gangemi, Valentina Presutti

Abstract

This tutorial targets ontology designers, engineers, and practitioners (including generic skilled web users). The tutorial provides a method based on good practices i.e., ontology design patterns, for the development of ontologies. We illustrate theoretical aspects of ontology design patterns, and analyse some relevant samples taken from a catalogue of ontology design patterns. The tutorial includes a hands-on session with ontology design activities, performed by using the available state of art platforms.

General Description

Web ontology design is a difficult task and, similarly as in Software Engineering, the reuse of existing resources and best practices can help designers to achieve that task. There are lots of ontologies already available on the Semantic Web, but the process of selecting the most appropriate to a specific project is still difficult, due to the often exceedingly large size of the ontologies, or to the lack of practical methods for verifying the quality of the ontologies against specific requirements. Over the last years, experience from different communities has produced good practices and guidelines for the design of Web ontologies, for example in the context of the W3C Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment working group, in either past or recent academic literature (in both knowledge engineering and conceptual modeling domains), in international projects, etc. Furthermore, our experience in designing ontologies for several domains has enabled us to collect a large number of solutions to recurrent modeling problems, as witnessed by a forthcoming ontology design pattern portal.

The goal of our tutorial is to teach designers, engineers, practitioners, and those interested in designing their own ontology on the Semantic Web, on how to use ontology design patterns for building new and evaluating existing Web ontologies against specific requirements.

Attendees should either have some experience of ontology design, or have skill in conceptual design and some knowledge of OWL. We will show practical examples that will make it clear how they can benefit from the learning units, and will let them practicing in a dedicated hands-on session. The session will be run by using a selection of tools for ontology engineering since no single tool shows yet a satisfactory performance on pattern-based ontology design.

Our tutorial will consist of keynote presentations and a hands-on session. Presentations will cover the theoretical aspects, while the hands-on session will splash into the attendees’ learning process by making them face typical problems arising during pattern-based ontology design.

We plan a full-day tutorial, the first part focusing on ontology design patterns theoretical aspects, while the second part on the hands-on session.

Content Overview

The tutorial starts with an introduction to ontology design principles. We proceed by providing attendees with the notion of ontology design pattern and by giving a definition for each of their possible types. For each type of ontology design pattern we show and analyze some samples. Finally, we describe a pattern-based method for ontology design. We exemplify it in a sample ontology design project. We also assess the functionalities of existing tools with reference to pattern-based ontology design. In the second part of the tutorial we provide attendees with the description of a domain and a set of competency questions to be addressed by an ontology. We ask them to design such an ontology by performing the method we described in the first part of the tutorial, and by exploiting a repository of reusable content ontology design patterns that is available online.

Outline

First session

• Introduction to ontology design principles.
• Definition of ontology design pattern (ODP).
• Types of ODPs: definition and analysis of samples
  • Structural ODPs
  • Reasoning ODPs
  • Correspondence ODPs
  • Presentation ODPs
  • Content ODPs
• Pattern-based ontology design
  • A method based on Content ODPs
  • Tool support for pattern-based ontology design

Second session

• Short introduction to the domain under analysis
• Development of the ontology by using Content ODPs
• Comparative analysis and discussion of proposed solutions

Requirements

Attendees are assumed:

• to have basic knowledge of OWL
• to have basic expertise of ontology design
• to have basic knowledge of the functionalities of at least one ontology design tools e.g., Protégé.

Attendees should bring their personal laptops and have at least an ontology engineering tool supporting multiple ontology editing installed (NeOn toolkit, Protégé 4, Swoop, TopBraid Composer, etc.).

Material

Tools

• NeOn toolkit
• TopBraid Composer: this is a commercial tool, a trial version is available to download;
• Protégé 4.0
• Swoop

Slides

The PDF version of the slides can be downloaded here.

Some References

1. Valentina Presutti, Aldo Gangemi, Stefano David, Guadalupe Aguado de Cea, Mari-Carmen Suarez Figueroa, Elena Montiel-Ponsoda, and Marıa Poveda. Library of design patterns for collaborative development of networked ontologies. Deliverable D2.5.1, NeOn project, 2008.
2. Mari Carmen Suarez-Figueroa, Saartje Brockmans, Aldo Gangemi, Asuncion Gomez-Perez, Jos Lehmann, Holger Lewen, Valentina Presutti, and Marta Sabou. Neon modelling components. Deliverable D5.1.1, NeOn project, 2007.
3. Carola Catenacci, Jos Lehmann, Malvina Nissim, Valentina Presutti, and Geri Steve. Design rationales for collaborative development of networked ontologies state of the art and the collaborative ontology design ontology. Deliverable D2.1.1, NeOn project, 2007.
4. Aldo Gangemi, Jos Lehmann, Valentina Presutti, Malvina Nissim, and Carola Catenacci. C-ODO: an OWL meta-model for collaborative ontology design. Workshop on Social and Collaborative Construction of Structured Knowledge (CKC 2007) at WWW 2007, Banff, Canada, (2007).
5. Denny Vrandecic and York Sure. How to Design Better Ontology Metrics. The Semantic Web: Research and Applications. Proceedings of the 4th European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2007), June 3-7, 2007, Innsbruck, Austria, volume4519ofLecture Notes in Computer Science, page 311-325. Springer, Berlin--Heidelberg, Germany, (2007).
6. Denny Vrandecic, York Sure, Raul Palma, and Francisco Santana. Ontology repository and content evaluation. Deliverable D1.2.10v2, KnowledgeWeb project, 2007.
7. Denny Vrandecic. Explicit Knowledge Engineering Patterns with Macros. In Proceedings of the Ontology Patterns for the Semantic Web Workshop at the ISWC 2005, Galway, Ireland, November2005.
8. Aldo Gangemi. Ontology Design Patterns for Semantic Web Content.In Proceedings of the 4th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2005), volume3729ofLNCS, Springer Verlag Berlin-Heidelberg, November2005.
9. Catalogue of ODPs focused on the biological knowledge domain
10. W3C Ontology Engineering and Patterns Task Force (OEP)
11. M. Gruninger and M. Fox. The role of competency questions in enterprise engineering. In Proceedings of the IFIP WG5.7 Workshop on Benchmarking Theory and Practice, Trondheim, Norway, 1994.
12. Denny Vrandecic and Aldo Gangemi. Unit tests for ontologies. In Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Ontology content and evaluation in Enterprise, Montpellier, France, Springer, OCT2006.
13. Eva Blomqvist. Fully automatic construction of enterprise ontologies using design patterns: Initial method and first experiences. In Robert Meersman, Zahir Tari, Mohand-Said Hacid, John Mylopoulos, Barbara Pernici, Ozalp Babaoglu, Hans-Arno Jacobsen, Joseph P. Loyall, Michael Kifer, and Stefano Spaccapietra, editors, OTM Conferences (2), volume 3761 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 1314–1329. Springer, 2005.

Hands-on session

• Go to the exercise page
• The ontology design patterns web portal: where you can find a catalogue of content ODPs and download their OWL implementation.