Tag: ODP

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Workshop on Ontology Design and Patterns held at ISWC 2017

On Saturday October 21st the 8th WOP workshop was run during ISWC2017 in Vienna, Austria. Eva Blomqvist has been the general chair of this workshop instance, and co-organisers included Oscar Corcho (UPM), David Carral (TU Dresden), Rinke Hoekstra (Elsevier) and Matthew Horridge (Stanford). The workshop program and other information can be found on the WOP2017 page.

Pascal Hitzler (Wright State University, US) kicked off the workshop with a very interesting keynote on next generation ontology engineering, listing a number of open problems and practical showstoppers towards better utilisation of ODPs in ontology engineering. Then we heard a number of exciting talks presenting the latest research around ODPs, and a number of actual ODPs were also described. The workshop concluded with a discussion session, conducted in three groups, focusing on different problems bought forth by the participants. The groups talked about meta-languages to describe ODPs and ODP usage, relations between ODPs, and the relation between ontologies and thesauri. Notes are on the WOP page linked above.

An interesting thing to note is that ODP research is getting broader, with two main tracks; one considering the classical view of ODPs as design patterns for ontologies, and the second one more focusing on ODPs as templates or macros for generating OWL from a specification. A lot of discussions at the workshop centered around how to use both these views together to allow users to benefit from both of them. Interest in ODPs is also not only an academic thing, in the audience there were several industry representatives from around the world. Overall, the workshop attracted a quite large audience, counting around 45 people during the main sessions. In the evening almost half of the attendants met again, for a social dinner at a local restaurant.

Anyone who is interested in updates on ODP research and future events is encouraged to join the ODP mailing list (a google group).

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Karl Hammar defended his PhD thesis on Ontology Design Patterns

On September 29, Karl Hammar successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled “Content Ontology Design Patterns: Qualities, Methods, and Tools”. The thesis was first presented by the opponent, professor Harald Sack, FIZ, Karlsruhe, Germany, who then continued to discuss the research results and future ideas with Karl. The three members of the examining committee then continued the discussion with Karl, before unanimously deciding to approve his thesis and award the PhD degree to Karl. At which point we could all congratulate him to a an interesting defence and an excellent thesis. In particular, his three supervisors, Henrik Eriksson (LiU), Eva Blomqvist (LiU) and Vladimir Tarassov (JTH) were of course the first to congratulate him, followed by colleagues and family.

Karl Hammar’s research has aimed to combine quantitative and qualitative research methods, primarily based on five ontology engineering projects involving inexperienced ontologists, studying how Ontology Design Patterns (ODPs) can support that specific group of users. A series of ontology engineering workshops and surveys provided data about developer preferences regarding ODP features and quality, ODP usage methodology, and ODP tooling needs. Other data sources were ontologies and ODPs published on the web, which have been studied in detail. To evaluate tooling improvements, experimental approaches provided data from comparison of new tools and techniques against established alternatives.

The analysis of the gathered data resulted in a set of measurable quality indicators that cover aspects of ODP documentation, formal representation or axiomatisation, and usage by ontologists. These indicators highlight quality trade-offs: for instance, between ODP Learnability and Reusability, or between Functional Suitability and Performance Efficiency. These are things that ontology engineers need to keep in mind when using ODPs in their ontologies, and in particular if they are inexperienced ontologists. Furthermore, the results demonstrated a need for ODP tools that support three novel property specialisation strategies, and highlighted the preference of inexperienced developers for template-based ODP instantiation, neither of which were supported in prior tooling. The studies also resulted in improvements to ODP search engines based on ODP-specific attributes. Finally, the analysis showed that a specific ontology engineering methodology, the eXtreme Design (XD), should include guidance for developer roles and responsibilities in ontology engineering projects, suggestions on how to reuse existing ontology resources, and approaches for adapting XD to project-specific contexts. Karl therefore proposed a new version of the XD methodology, specifically covering these aspects.

The thesis can be found here.



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Congratulations Karl!

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LiU Semantic Web group at ESWC2017

This week a couple of us have been at ESWC2017 in Portoroz, Slovenia. Eva Blomqvist was the general chair of the conference this year, hence, this was the culmination of a whole year of hard work for her. Olaf Hartig is the proceedings chair (proceedings part 1 and 2). He could not attend the conference this year, but has done great job with the Springer proceedings, and the upcoming post-proceedings volume with poster and demo papers among other things. In addition to this, Karl Hammar, was one of the organisers of the Modular Ontology Modeling with Ontology Design Patterns tutorial, together with Pascal Hitzler, Adila A. Krisnadhi, Agnieszka Lawrynowicz and Monika Solanki. In particular, Karl ran the hands-on session with his tool for ODP-based modelling in WebProtégé (called XDP). Finally, Henrik Eriksson, presented our EU-funded project VALCRI in the project networking session, and in the poster session.

The overall conference was interesting as always, and included a lot of networking opportunities, as well as interesting work to take a closer look at. A quick summary of some of the major events:

Crosbie

Kevin Crosbie, from Ravenpack, the first keynote speaker talking about how to model events in order to use them for predicting financial markets. Very interesting talk, describing how Ravenpack work with their data products and apply technologies very similar to Semantic Web, although technically not using the W3C standards, such as RDF.

Panel

At the end of the first day, Aldo Gangemi chaired a panel about the future of academic publishing, discussing the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. It is clear that something needs to be done about both the reviewing situation in our field, the open access issue, and we want more focus on “eating our own dog food”. The discussions were also related to the paper that later won the best student paper award, on Linked Data Notifications.

Sheridan

Second keynote speaker, John Sheridan, from the National Archives in the UK, described how the National Archives heavily rely on Semantic Web technologies and standards to solve their archiving tasks. However there are also challenges of course, which can hopefully be solved by working together: academia and society at large. Particularly interesting for us at LiU to hear that the National Archives is in great need of a better solution for modelling trust and uncertainty in their data, which could be a potential use case for the recent research results on RDF* and SPARQL* by Olaf Hartig.

Dinner

Nice conference dinner at the beach, and a chance for the general chair to thank all the people in the organising committee.

Poster

Poster session with lots of interesting interactions and discussion, here with Diego Reforgirato, who later won both the best poster and best demo awards.

Unfortunately, we did not take any picture of the last keynote, Lora Aroyo, who gave a very interesting keynote on the last day. She started with an overview of the evolution of the field, pointing out that studying and using people to acquire knowledge has always been a central part of our research. However, by over simplifying, and trying to fit every answer into yes/no categories, we can introduce wrong conclusions. She means that we need to be aware of ambiguity and diversity in opinions, that there is usually not one true answer, and instead turn that to our advantage. Lora showed a vector-based model to represent diversity in opinions.

Finally, Aldo Gangemi will be the next general chair of ESWC in 2018, and he made a series of interesting promises for the next year, among others: double-open review process, improvements in the online pre-prints of the proceedings and the dataset, a resources track and an industry session á la ISWC, and better music in the social events. We all wish him the best of luck with the next conference, and we are excited to see all the innovations next year!

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Even more LiU Research at ISWC 2016 – Ontology Design Patterns

In addition to the work mentioned in a previous post about ISWC, the LiU Semantic Web research team has also been very active in the Ontology Design Patterns (ODPs) sub-community at ISWC.

On Monday (October 17), Karl Hammar co-arranged the tutorial session Ontology Design Patterns for Linked Data Publishing. The tutorial was very well-received, with over 30 participants learning about ODP theory and practice, and evaluating Karl’s XD for WebProtégé ODP tooling.

On Tuesday (October 18), Karl also co-arranged the 7th Workshop on Ontology and Semantic Web Patterns, at which he also presented two papers: Template-Based Content ODP Instantiation and How to Document Ontology Design Patterns. In total there were twelve presentations given at the workshop, two keynote talks, and a town hall meeting discussing future directions of research and other issues of weight to the ODP community. Approximately 25 people attended the workshop, and the quality of the work presented and of the subsequent discussions was excellent.

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