Textual and logical definitions in ontologies

ASK-IT final …, 2008

One of the main stages of the ontology authoring process is the adoption of the appropriate specifications to ensure that the ontology structure and design adheres to a set of common best practices. Existing ontology authoring tools on the one hand, mainly support ontology editing operations as well as visualization facilities. These tools allow the design and implementation of new ontologies but without enforcing restrictions arising from currently known best practices for ontology authoring techniques. Reasoners on the other hand are useful for automatic checking of the logical consistency of ontologies, by performing operations such as subsumption, equivalence and instantiation checking, but assume that the ontology has been properly structured in the first place in order to produce valid results. During the ontology authoring process, a set of conditions should be applied to ensure process validity. These conditions are used to check the degree of completeness of fulfillment of the following criteria: concept and property hierarchy, module subtraction, documentation and visualization, definition of ranges for property values, disjointness restrictions and adherence to naming conventions. This paper presents a set of criteria to ensure ontology validation and introduces a methodological approach for the application of these criteria on existing ontologies. We then demonstrate the application of the proposed methodology through a specific case study. This concerns the refinement of six ontologies which have been developed in the context of the integrated project ASK-IT.

2018

Terminologie & Ontologie: Théories et Applications. Conférence TOTh 2017.Chambéry – 8 & 9 juin 2017Ontology editors are tools developed to classify and describe objects in a database that will be used by a computer program for any of a number of purposes. Since this tool allows elements to be grouped and classified, we decided it could be applied to the management of terminological concepts. To do so, we have formalised the description of the terminological concepts by means of characteristics and values, so that they match the form required by ontologies. Then, we show how to implement the conceptual information in the ontology editor Protégé, and more specifically how to represent concepts, descriptions of concepts and terminological definitions. We also analyse the advantages and drawbacks of this way of representing concepts, as well as outlining the future work that we are developing in relation to i

Selja Seppälä. An ontological framework for modeling the contents of definitions. Terminology, 21(1):23–50, 2015.

This paper addresses the troublesome question of feature selection and content prediction in definition writing. I present the basis of definition-authoring tools that can be used across a range of contexts, independently of the domain and language of the definitions. In addition to being domain- and language-independent, these tools should be easily tailorable to specific domains. Thus, my work seeks to contribute to developing generic definition-writing aids that can be tailored to a range of different contexts and domains. The objectives of this article are: (1) to show that it is possible to create implementable generic definition models; (2) to show how to constrain these models to produce definitions relevant to particular contexts; and (3) to propose an ontological analysis frameworkwith a fixed and well-motivated descriptive vocabulary that can be used in further content analysis studies in terminology and to enhance integration of textual definitions in ontologies.

11th European-Japanese …, 2001

In this paper, we consider an ontology as a set of terms together with three binary relations on terms, called synonymy, subsumption and crossreference. We present a model-theoretic interpretation of ontologies and we show that this approach although appropriate for deciding the soundness of an ontology, is not sufficient for providing a sound and complete inference procedure for checking the validity of expressions in an ontology. Therefore a different "proof-theoretic" approach which allows checking the validity of expressions is also presented. 2 Ontologies Intuitively, an ontology consists of a set of words, or terms, and a set of relationships between the terms. Each term describes some aspect of a set of objects of interest and the relationships between terms reflect corresponding relationships between the objects. The assignment of meaning to terms and the recording of relationships are the outcome of a formal process and enjoy the consensus of some community. We conceptualize the world as a set of objects, that is, we assume an arbitrary, but fixed, domain of discourse and a corresponding set of objects Obj. The only constraint that we impose on the set Obj is that it must be a denumerable set. Def 2.1 A terminology is a finite set of words pertaining to the objects in a specific domain of discourse. The elements of a terminology are called terms. For example, the following set is a terminology for describing the content of university courses: T = f mathematics history computer science humanities :::g Here the underlying set Obj is the set of course identifiers, such as M315, H213, CS265 and so on. The set of objects described by a term is the interpretation of that term. Def 2.2 Given a terminology T, we call interpretation of T over Obj any function I : T ! 2 Obj. Thus each term t denotes certain objects in Obj and its interpretation I(t) is the set of objects to which the term t is correctly applied. In our discussion the set Obj will be usually understood from the context. So we shall often say simply "an interpretation" instead of "an interpretation over Obj". In the previous example, an interpretation of T by a given agent might assign to the term mathematics all course identifiers beginning with M, to history all course identifiers beginning with H, to computer science all course identifiers beginning with CS, and so on. However, note that different agents may attach different interpretations to the same term. Strictly speaking, interpretation, as defined above assigns to a term denotational or extensional meaning ([30]). As we explained earlier, an ontology comprises not only a terminology, i.e. a set of terms, but also relationships between those terms. For the purposes of this paper, we shall consider three kinds of relationships, as stated in the following definition: Def 2.3 An ontology is a quadruple A = (T) where T is a terminology and are binary relations over T such that: " " is reflexive, symmetric and transitive (i.e. an equivalence relation). Conceptually, " " means "synonym of", e.g. math mathematics, computer science informatics. " " is irreflexive, transitive, and asymmetric. Conceptually, " " means "subsumed by" or "isA" or "covered by", e.g. math sciences, canaries birds. " " is reflexive and symmetric. Conceptually, " " means "cross-reference" or "related to" in the sense of non-disjoint interpretations e.g. math computer science, computers electronics, pets parrots.

1999

Ontologies allow the abstract conceptualisation of domains, but a given domain can be conceptualised through many different ontologies, which can be problematic when ontologies are used to support knowledge sharing. We present a formal account of ontologies that is intended to support knowledge sharing through precise characterisations of relationships such as compatibility and refinement. We take an algebraic approach, in which ontologies are presented as logical theories.