Chapter 7
Ontology Engineering
Grigoris Antoniou
Frank van Harmelen
1 Chapter 7 A Semantic Web Primer
Lecture Outline
1. Introduction
2. Constructing Ontologies Manually
3. Reusing Existing Ontologies
4. Using Semiautomatic Methods
5. On-To-Knowledge SW Architecture
2 Chapter 7 A Semantic Web Primer
Methodological Questions
– How can tools and techniques best be applied?
– Which languages and tools should be used in
which circumstances, and in which order?
– What about issues of quality control and resource
management?
Many of these questions for the Semantic
Web have been studied in other contexts
– E.g. software engineering, object-oriented design,
and knowledge engineering
3 Chapter 7 A Semantic Web Primer
Lecture Outline
1. Introduction
2. Constructing Ontologies Manually
3. Reusing Existing Ontologies
4. Using Semiautomatic Methods
5. On-To-Knowledge SW Architecture
4 Chapter 7 A Semantic Web Primer
Main Stages in Ontology Development
1. Determine scope
2. Consider reuse
3. Enumerate terms
4. Define taxonomy
5. Define properties
6. Define facets
7. Define instances
8. Check for anomalies
Not a linear process!
5 Chapter 7 A Semantic Web Primer
Determine Scope
There is no correct ontology of a specific
domain
– An ontology is an abstraction of a particular
domain, and there are always viable alternatives
What is included in this abstraction should be
determined by
– the use to which the ontology will be put
– by future extensions that are already anticipated
6 Chapter 7 A Semantic Web Primer
Determine Scope (2)
Basic questions to be answered at this stage
are:
– What is the domain that the ontology will cover?
– For what we are going to use the ontology?
– For what types of questions should the ontology
provide answers?
– Who will use and maintain the ontology?
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Consider Reuse
With the spreading deployment of the
Semantic Web, ontologies will become more
widely available
We rarely have to start from scratch when
defining an ontology
– There is almost always an ontology available from
a third party that provides at least a useful starting
point for our own ontology
8 Chapter 7 A Semantic Web Primer
Enumerate Terms
Write down in an unstructured list all the relevant
terms that are expected to appear in the ontology
– Nouns form the basis for class names
– Verbs (or verb phrases) form the basis for property names
Traditional knowledge engineering tools (e.g.
laddering and grid analysis) can be used to obtain
– the set of terms
– an initial structure for these terms
9 Chapter 7 A Semantic Web Primer
Define Taxonomy
Relevant terms must be organized in a
taxonomic hierarchy
– Opinions differ on whether it is more
efficient/reliable to do this in a top-down or a
bottom-up fashion
Ensure that hierarchy is indeed a taxonomy:
– If A is a subclass of B, then every instance of A
must also be an instance of B (compatible with
semantics of rdfs:subClassOf
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Define Properties
Often interleaved with the previous step
The semantics of subClassOf demands that
whenever A is a subclass of B, every
property statement that holds for instances of
B must also apply to instances of A
– It makes sense to attach properties to the highest
class in the hierarchy to which they apply
11 Chapter 7 A Semantic Web Primer
Define Properties (2)
While attaching properties to classes, it
makes sense to immediately provide
statements about the domain and range of
these properties
There is a methodological tension here
between generality and specificity:
– Flexibility (inheritance to subclasses)
– Detection of inconsistencies and misconceptions
12 Chapter 7 A Semantic Web Primer
Define Facets: From RDFS to OWL
Cardinality restrictions
Required values
– owl:hasValue
– owl:allValuesFrom
– owl:someValuesFrom
Relational characteristics
– symmetry, transitivity, inverse properties,
functional values
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Define Instances
Filling the ontologies with such instances is a
separate step
Number of instances >> number of classes
Thus populating an ontology with instances
is not done manually
– Retrieved from legacy data sources (DBs)
– Extracted automatically from a text corpus
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Check for Anomalies
An important advantage of the use of OWL over RDF
Schema is the possibility to detect inconsistencies
– In ontology or ontology+instances
Examples of common inconsistencies
– incompatible domain and range definitions for transitive,
symmetric, or inverse properties
– cardinality properties
– requirements on property values can conflict with domain
and range restrictions
15 Chapter 7 A Semantic Web Primer
Lecture Outline
1. Introduction
2. Constructing Ontologies Manually
3. Reusing Existing Ontologies
4. Using Semiautomatic Methods
5. On-To-Knowledge SW Architecture
16 Chapter 7 A Semantic Web Primer
Existing Domain-Specific Ontologies
Medical domain: Cancer ontology from the National
Cancer Institute in the United States
Cultural domain:
– Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) with 125,000 terms in
the cultural domain
– Union List of Artist Names (ULAN), with 220,000 entries on
artists
– Iconclass vocabulary of 28,000 terms for describing cultural
images
Geographical domain: Getty Thesaurus of
Geographic Names (TGN), containing over 1 million
entries
17 Chapter 7 A Semantic Web Primer
Integrated Vocabularies
Merge independently developed vocabularies into a
single large resource
E.g. Unified Medical Language System
integrating100 biomedical vocabularies
– The UMLS metathesaurus contains 750,000 concepts, with
over 10 million links between them
The semantics of a resource that integrates many
independently developed vocabularies is rather low
– But very useful in many applications as starting point
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Upper-Level Ontologies
Some attempts have been made to define
very generally applicable ontologies
– Mot domain-specific
Cyc, with 60,000 assertions on 6,000
concepts
Standard Upperlevel Ontology (SUO)
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Topic Hierarchies
Some “ontologies” do not deserve this name:
– simply sets of terms, loosely organized in a hierarchy
This hierarchy is typically not a strict taxonomy but
rather mixes different specialization relations (e.g.
is-a, part-of, contained-in)
Such resources often very useful as starting point
Example: Open Directory hierarchy, containing
more then 400,000 hierarchically organized
categories and available in RDF format
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Linguistic Resources
Some resources were originally built not as
abstractions of a particular domain, but
rather as linguistic resources
These have been shown to be useful as
starting places for ontology development
– E.g. WordNet, with over 90,000 word senses
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Ontology Libraries
Attempts are currently underway to construct online
libraries of online ontologies
– Rarely existing ontologies can be reused without changes
– Existing concepts and properties must be refined using
rdfs:subClassOf and rdfs:subPropertyOf
– Alternative names must be introduced which are better
suited to the particular domain using owl:equivalentClass
and owl:equivalentProperty
– We can exploit the fact that RDF and OWL allow private
refinements of classes defined in other ontologies
22 Chapter 7 A Semantic Web Primer
Lecture Outline
1. Introduction
2. Constructing Ontologies Manually
3. Reusing Existing Ontologies
4. Using Semiautomatic Methods
5. On-To-Knowledge SW Architecture
23 Chapter 7 A Semantic Web Primer
The Knowledge Acquisition Bottleneck
Manual ontology acquisition remains a time-
consuming, expensive, highly skilled, and
sometimes cumbersome task
Machine Learning techniques may be used
to alleviate
– knowledge acquisition or extraction
– knowledge revision or maintenance
24 Chapter 7 A Semantic Web Primer
Tasks Supported by Machine Learning
Extraction of ontologies from existing data on the
Web
Extraction of relational data and metadata from
existing data on the Web
Merging and mapping ontologies by analyzing
extensions of concepts
Maintaining ontologies by analyzing instance data
Improving SW applications by observing users
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Useful Machine Learning Techniques
for Ontology Engineering
Clustering
Incremental ontology updates
Support for the knowledge engineer
Improving large natural language ontologies
Pure (domain) ontology learning
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Machine Learning Techniques for
Natural Language Ontologies
Natural language ontologies (NLOs) contain lexical
relations between language concepts
– They are large in size and do not require frequent updates
The state of the art in NLO learning looks quite
optimistic:
– A stable general-purpose NLO exist
– Techniques for automatically or semi-automatically
constructing and enriching domain-specific NLOs exist
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Machine Learning Techniques for
Domain Ontologies
They provide detailed descriptions
Usually they are constructed manually
The acquisition of the domain ontologies is
still guided by a human knowledge engineer
– Automated learning techniques play a minor role
in knowledge acquisition
– They have to find statistically valid
dependencies in the domain texts and suggest
them to the knowledge engineer
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Machine Learning Techniques for
Ontology Instances
Ontology instances can be generated
automatically and frequently updated while
the ontology remains unchanged
Fits nicely into a machine learning framework
Successful ML applications
– Are strictly dependent on the domain ontology, or
– Populate the markup without relating to any
domain theory
– General-purpose techniques not yet available
29 Chapter 7 A Semantic Web Primer
Different Uses of Ontology Learning
Ontology acquisition tasks in knowledge engineering
– Ontology creation from scratch by the knowledge engineer
– Ontology schema extraction from Web documents
– Extraction of ontology instances from Web documents
Ontology maintenance tasks
– Ontology integration and navigation
– Updating some parts of an ontology
– Ontology enrichment or tuning
30 Chapter 7 A Semantic Web Primer
Ontology Acquisition Tasks
Ontology creation from scratch by the knowledge
engineer
– ML assists the knowledge engineer by suggesting the most
important relations in the field or checking and verifying the
constructed knowledge bases
Ontology schema extraction from Web documents
– ML takes the data and meta-knowledge (like a meta-
ontology) as input and generate the ready-to-use ontology
as output with the possible help of the knowledge engineer
31 Chapter 7 A Semantic Web Primer
Ontology Acquisition Tasks(2)
Extraction of ontology instances from Web
documents
– This task extracts the instances of the ontology
presented in the Web documents and populates
given ontology schemas
– This task is similar to information extraction and
page annotation, and can apply the techniques
developed in these areas
32 Chapter 7 A Semantic Web Primer
Ontology Maintenance Tasks
Ontology integration and navigation
– Deals with reconstructing and navigating in large
and possibly machine-learned knowledge bases
Updating some parts of an ontology that are
designed to be updated
Ontology enrichment or tuning
– This does not change major concepts and
structures but makes an ontology more precise
33 Chapter 7 A Semantic Web Primer
Potentially Applicable Machine
Learning Algorithms
Propositional rule learning algorithms
Bayesian learning
– generates probabilistic attribute-value rules
First-order logic rules learning
Clustering algorithms
– They group the instances together based on the
similarity or distance measures between a pair of
instances defined in terms of their attribute values
34 Chapter 7 A Semantic Web Primer
Lecture Outline
1. Introduction
2. Constructing Ontologies Manually
3. Reusing Existing Ontologies
4. Using Semiautomatic Methods
5. On-To-Knowledge SW Architecture
35 Chapter 7 A Semantic Web Primer
On-To-Knowledge Architecture
Building the Semantic Web involves using
– the new languages described in this course
– a rather different style of engineering
– a rather different approach to application integration
We describe how a number of Semantic Web-related
tools can be integrated in a single lightweight
architecture using Semantic Web standards to
achieve interoperability between tools
36 Chapter 7 A Semantic Web Primer
Knowledge Acquisition
Initially, tools must exist that use surface
analysis techniques to obtain content from
documents
– Unstructured natural language documents:
statistical techniques and shallow natural language
technology
– Structured and semi-structured documents:
wrappers induction, pattern recognition
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Knowledge Storage
The output of the analysis tools is sets of concepts,
organized in a shallow concept hierarchy with at best
very few cross-taxonomical relationships
RDF/RDF Schema are sufficiently expressive to
represent the extracted info
– Store the knowledge produced by the extraction tools
– Retrieve this knowledge, preferably using a structured query
language (e.g. RQL)
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Knowledge Maintenance and Use
A practical Semantic Web repository must provide
functionality for managing and maintaining the
ontology:
– change management
– access and ownership rights
– transaction management
There must be support for both
– Lightweight ontologies that are automatically generated
from unstructured and semi-structured data
– Human engineering of much more knowledge-intensive
ontologies
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Knowledge Maintenance and Use (2)
Sophisticated editing environments must be able to
– Retrieve ontologies from the repository
– Allow a knowledge engineer to manipulate it
– Place it back in the repository
The ontologies and data in the repository are to be
used by applications that serve an end-user
– We have already described a number of such applications
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Technical Interoperability
Syntactic interoperability was achieved because all
components communicated in RDF
Semantic interoperability was achieved because all
semantics was expressed using RDF Schema
Physical interoperability was achieved because
All communications between components were
established using simple HTTP connections
41 Chapter 7 A Semantic Web Primer
On-To-Knowledge System
Architecture
42 Chapter 7 A Semantic Web Primer
