research-article

Characterising the Gap Between Theory and Practice of Ontology Reuse

Authors:

Valentina Tamma, and

Floriana GrassoAuthors Info & Claims

K-CAP '21: Proceedings of the 11th Knowledge Capture Conference

December 2021

Pages 217 - 224

https://doi.org/10.1145/3460210.3493568

Published: 02 December 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Ontology reuse is a complex process that requires the support of methodologies and tools to minimise errors and to keep the ontologies consistent and coherent. Although the vast majority of ontology engineering methodologies include a reuse phase, and reuse has been investigated for different tasks and purposes (e.g.ontology integration), this body of work does not seem to translate into practice, neither in the form of strict criteria for reuse, nor as a set of community proposed guidelines. In this paper, we report the salient results from a study aimed at ontology developers and practitioners, whose objective is to gain an insight into the gap between the theory and the practice of ontology reuse. Thefocus of our study is to gain practitioners' views on i) their preferred reuse approaches; ii) the types of ontologies they tend to reuse (e.g. specific domain ontologies or upper-level ontologies)iii) what reporting information they deem useful when deciding which ontology to reuse; iv) what are the main reasons deterring them from reusing an ontology. Our findings confirm and extend established results from the literature, but in addition, the study provides a fresh view on the practice of reuse with an explicit focus on highly experienced developers and moderately experienced ones. The study corroborates the need for a comprehensive set of recommendations, that are widely accepted by the community, and are possibly implemented in development tools.

References

[1]

E Blomqvist, K Hammar, and V Presutti. 2016. Engineering Ontologies with Patterns-The eXtreme Design Methodology. In Ontology Engineering with Ontology Design Patterns: Foundations and Applications. Studies on the Semantic Web, Vol. 25. IOS Press, 23--50.

[2]

V A Carriero, M Daquino, A Gangemi, A G Nuzzolese, S Peroni, V Presutti, and F Tomasi. 2020. The Landscape of Ontology Reuse Approaches. In Applications and Practices in Ontology Design, Extraction, and Reasoning. Studies on the Semantic Web, Vol. 49. IOS Press, 21--38.

[3]

A Duque-Ramos, J T Fernández-Breis, R Stevens, and N Aussenac-Gilles. 2011. OQuaRE: A SQuaRE-Based Approach for Evaluating the Quality of oOtologies. Journal of Research and Practice in Information Technology, Vol. 43, 2 (2011), 159--176.

[4]

M Fernández-López, A Gómez-Pérez, and M C Suárez-Figueroa. 2013. Methodological Guidelines for Reusing General Ontologies. Data & Knowledge Engineering, Vol. 86 (2013), 242--275.

[5]

M Fernández-López, M Poveda-Villalón, M C Suárez-Figueroa, and A Gómez-Pérez. 2019. Why are Ontologies not Reused Across the Same Domain? Journal of Web Semantics, Vol. 57 (2019), 100492.

Digital Library

[6]

A Gangemi, C Catenacci, M Ciaramita, J Lehmann, R Gil, F Bolici, and O Strignano. 2005. Ontology Evaluation and Validation: An Integrated Formal Model for the Quality Diagnostic Task . Technical Report. Laboratory of Applied Ontologies -- CNR. http://www.loa.istc.cnr.it/old/Files/OntoEval4OntoDev_Final.pdf Last Accessed 12-09--2021.

[7]

A Gangemi and V Presutti. 2009. Ontology Design Patterns. In Handbook on ontologies . Springer, 221--243.

[8]

Daniel Garijo. 2017. WIDOCO: A Wizard for Documenting Ontologies. In The Semantic Web -- ISWC 2017 . Springer International Publishing, Cham, 94--102.

[9]

A Ghazvinian, N Fridman Noy, and M A Musen. 2011. How Orthogonal are the OBO Foundry Ontologies? Journal of Biomedical Semantics, Vol. 2, 2 (2011), 1--14.

[10]

T R Gruber. 1993. A Translation Approach to Portable Ontology Specifications. Knowledge acquisition, Vol. 5, 2 (1993), 199--220.

[11]

M R Kamdar, T Tudorache, and M A Musen. 2017. A Systematic Analysis of Term Reuse and Term Overlap across Biomedical Ontologies. Semantic Web, Vol. 8, 6 (2017), 853--871.

Digital Library

[12]

M Katsumi and M Grüninger. 2016. What is Ontology Reuse?. In FOIS 2016 - 9th Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications, Vol. 283). IOS Press, 9--22.

[13]

M Katsumi and M Grüninger. 2017. Choosing Ontologies for Reuse. Applied Ontology, Vol. 12, 3--4 (2017), 195--221.

[14]

C Kindermann, B Parsia, and U Sattler. 2019. Detecting Influences of Ontology Design Patterns in Biomedical Ontologies. In ISWC 2019 -- 18th International Semantic Web Conference (LNCS, Vol. 11778). Springer, 311--328.

[15]

Boris Konev, Carsten Lutz, Dirk Walther, and Frank Wolter. 2009. Formal Properties of Modularisation. In Modular Ontologies: Concepts, Theories and Techniques for Knowledge Modularization (Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 5445). Springer, 25--66.

[16]

N Matentzoglu, J Malone, C Mungall, and R Stevens. 2018. MIRO: Guidelines for Minimum Information for the Reporting of an Ontology. Journal of biomedical semantics, Vol. 9, 1 (2018), 1--13.

[17]

Chris Mungall. 2021. How to Select and Request Terms from Ontologies. Blog: Monkeying around with OWL, July 3, 2021 entry. https://douroucouli.wordpress.com/2021/07/03/how-select-and-request-terms-from-ontologies/

[18]

R Neches, R E Fikes, T Finin, T Gruber, R Patil, T Senator, and W R Swartout. 1991. Enabling Technology for Knowledge Sharing. AI magazine, Vol. 12, 3 (1991), 36--56.

[19]

N Noy and D L McGuinness. 2001. Ontology Development 101 . Technical Report KSL-01-05. Knowledge Systems Laboratory, Stanford University.

[20]

C Ochs, Y Perl, J Geller, S Arabandi, T Tudorache, and M A Musen. 2017. An Empirical Analysis of Ontology Reuse in BioPortal. Journal of Biomedical Informatics, Vol. 71 (2017), 165--177.

[21]

J Park, S Oh, and J Ahn. 2011. Ontology Selection Ranking Model for Knowledge Reuse. Expert Systems with Applications, Vol. 38, 5 (2011), 5133--5144.

Digital Library

[22]

M Poveda Villalón, M C Suárez-Figueroa, and A Gómez-Pérez. 2012. The Landscape of Ontology Reuse in Linked Data. In EKAW 2012 Workshop on Ontology Engineering in a Data-driven World (OEDW) .

[23]

V Presutti, E Blomqvist, E Daga, and A Gangemi. 2012. Pattern-Based Ontology Design. In Ontology Engineering in a Networked World. Springer, 35--64.

[24]

J Schaible, T Gottron, and A Scherp. 2014. Survey on Common Strategies of Vocabulary Reuse in Linked Open Data Modeling. In The Semantic Web: Trends and Challenges 11th International Conference, ESWC 2014 (LNCS, Vol. 8465). Springer, 457--472.

[25]

E Simperl. 2009. Reusing Ontologies on the Semantic Web: A Feasibility Study. Data & Knowledge Engineering, Vol. 68, 10 (2009), 905--925.

Digital Library

[26]

R Studer, V R Benjamins, and D Fensel. 1998. Knowledge Engineering: Principles and Methods. Data & Knowledge Engineering, Vol. 25, 1--2 (1998), 161--197.

Digital Library

[27]

M C Suárez-Figueroa, A Gómez-Pérez, and M Fernández-López. 2012. The NeOn methodology for ontology engineering. In Ontology Engineering in a Networked World. Springer, 9--34.

[28]

K Supekar, C Patel, and Y Lee. 2004. Characterizing Quality of Knowledge on Semantic Web. In 17th International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society FLAIRS. AAAI Press, 472--478.

[29]

M Talebpour, M D Sykora, and T Jackson. 2017. The Role of Community and Social Metrics in Ontology Evaluation: An Interview Study of Ontology Reuse. In 9th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management KEOD 2017 . SCITEPRESS, 119--127.

[30]

S Tartir, I B Arpinar, M Moore, A P Sheth, and B Aleman-Meza. 2005. OntoQA: Metric-Based Ontology Quality Analysis. In IEEE ICDM Workshop on Knowledge Acquisition from Distributed, Autonomous, Semantically Heterogeneous Data and Knowledge Source. 45--53.

[31]

M Uschold. 2018. Demystifying OWL for the Enterprise .Morgan & Claypool Publishers.

[32]

Chiara Del Vescovo, Matthew Horridge, Bijan Parsia, Uli Sattler, Thomas Schneider, and Haoruo Zhao. 2020. Modular Structures and Atomic Decomposition in Ontologies. J. Artif. Intell. Res., Vol. 69 (2020), 963--1021. https://doi.org/10.1613/jair.1.12151

[33]

D Wi'sniewski, J Potoniec, A Ławrynowicz, and C M Keet. 2019. Analysis of Ontology Competency Questions and their Formalizations in SPARQL-OWL. Journal of Web Semantics, Vol. 59 (2019), 100534.

Digital Library

[34]

Zuoshuang Xiang, Mélanie Courtot, Ryan R. Brinkman, Alan Ruttenberg, and Yongqun He. 2010. OntoFox: web-based support for ontology reuse. BMC Research Notes, Vol. 3, 1 (2010), 175. https://doi.org/10.1186/1756-0500--3--175

Cited By

Alharbi RTamma VGrasso F(2024)Requirement-Based Methodological Steps to Identify Ontologies for ReuseIntelligent Information Systems10.1007/978-3-031-61000-4_8(64-72)Online publication date: 29-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-61000-4_8
Abdelreheim MSoliman TKlan F(2023)A Personalized Ontology Recommendation System to Effectively Support Ontology Development by ReuseFuture Internet10.3390/fi1510033115:10(331)Online publication date: 7-Oct-2023
https://doi.org/10.3390/fi15100331
Rodríguez-Revello JBarba-González CRybinski MNavas-Delgado I(2023)KNITExpert Systems with Applications: An International Journal10.1016/j.eswa.2023.120239228:COnline publication date: 15-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.eswa.2023.120239
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Characterising the Gap Between Theory and Practice of Ontology Reuse
1. Information systems
  1. Information retrieval
    1. Document representation
      1. Content analysis and feature selection
      2. Ontologies

Recommendations

The ProtégéLOV Plugin: Ontology Access and Reuse for Everyone
The Semantic Web: ESWC 2015 Satellite Events
Abstract
Developing ontologies, by reusing already available and well-known ontologies, is commonly acknowledge to play a crucial role to facilitate inclusion and expansion of the Web of Data. Some recommendations exist to guide ontologists in ontology ...
Read More
From reference ontologies to ontology patterns and back

Building proper reference ontologies is a hard task. There are a number of methods and tools that traditionally have been used to support this task. These include the use of foundational theories, the reuse of domain and core ontologies, the adoption of ...
Read More
COMPETENCY QUESTIONS FOR BIOMEDICAL ONTOLOGY REUSE
Abstract
Reusing ontologies has been recognized as a good practice that most ontology building methodologies encourage. Indeed, reuse supports the semantic interoperability among different datasets and applications, increases accuracy, and reduces ...
Read More

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

K-CAP '21: Proceedings of the 11th Knowledge Capture Conference

December 2021

300 pages

ISBN:9781450384575

DOI:10.1145/3460210

General Chair:
Anna Lisa Gentile
IBM Research Almaden, USA
,
Program Chair:
Rafael Gonçalves
Center for Computational Biomedicine, Harvard Medical School, USA

Copyright © 2021 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Sponsors

SIGAI: ACM Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 02 December 2021

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Funding Sources

Taibah University

Conference

K-CAP '21

Sponsor:

SIGAI

K-CAP '21: Knowledge Capture Conference

December 2 - 3, 2021

Virtual Event, USA

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 55 of 198 submissions, 28%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

5
Total Citations
View Citations
118
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)35
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)9

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Alharbi RTamma VGrasso F(2024)Requirement-Based Methodological Steps to Identify Ontologies for ReuseIntelligent Information Systems10.1007/978-3-031-61000-4_8(64-72)Online publication date: 29-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-61000-4_8
Abdelreheim MSoliman TKlan F(2023)A Personalized Ontology Recommendation System to Effectively Support Ontology Development by ReuseFuture Internet10.3390/fi1510033115:10(331)Online publication date: 7-Oct-2023
https://doi.org/10.3390/fi15100331
Rodríguez-Revello JBarba-González CRybinski MNavas-Delgado I(2023)KNITExpert Systems with Applications: An International Journal10.1016/j.eswa.2023.120239228:COnline publication date: 15-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.eswa.2023.120239
Keet CKeet C(2023)Ontologies and Similar ArtefactsThe What and How of Modelling Information and Knowledge10.1007/978-3-031-39695-3_5(81-114)Online publication date: 18-Nov-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39695-3_5
Azzi SAssi AGagnon S(2023)Scoring Ontologies for Reuse: An Approach for Fitting Semantic RequirementsMetadata and Semantic Research10.1007/978-3-031-39141-5_17(203-208)Online publication date: 10-Aug-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39141-5_17

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents