Chapter 2: Before you begin - KGConf/BookClub-OntologyEngineering GitHub Wiki

Questions

Matthias Sesboüé

  • Can you give an example of how to proceed when we want to reuse only a sub-part of an ontology (or of a module of an ontology). Should we manually extract the part of interest or recreate our own definitions?
  • Section 2.4 in the model-centric perspectives, I am not sure I understand the second bullet (at the top of page 22). What do you mean by "passive" and "active" structures?
  • Section 2.7, language selection, can you give some examples of different languages and their specificities?

Ann Clark

  • Section 2.1, how familiar should an ontologist be with the ISO standards related to terminology, such as ISO 704:2009, and ISO 10241-1:2011?
  • Section 2.2, Modeling and Levels of Abstraction, the four layers proposed for a financial application, have either of the authors mapped these to the framework shown in figure 2.1?

Audrey Maldonado

  • Section 2.3, You mention here that it is recommended to re-use standardized, well-tested, and available ontologies whenever possible. This prompted me to look for a way to find existing ontologies. Is there a robust search tool or directory to find examples of well-tested ontologies that already exist?

Larry Swanson

  • Near the end of the first paragraph on page 19 you use the word "actors" in a way that's not entirely clear to me. Can you elaborate? The full sentence reads "Information elements should be represented as actors in those use cases."

Meeting Minutes

An oncologist should be aware of the existence of ISO standards related to terminology, such as ISO 704:2009, and ISO 10241-1:2011. The real challenge for an ontology engineering project is to get people, stakeholders, to agree on HOW to define and build descriptions. You can refer to those standards to solve any contentious. Whatever you chose to go with, what is very important is that people have the same way of defining things.

It is indeed recommended to re-use standardized, well-tested, and available ontologies whenever possible. Fortunately and, unfortunately as well, places to search and find ontologies are more and more everywhere. Some are focusing on metadata, others on a specific domain description, and others on actual instances. The main issue is to assess the quality of an ontology before using it. There is no standard way to assess the quality of an ontology. This quality check is made using rules of thumbs such as:

  • Looking at the author's or organization's reputation
  • checking for logical consistencies
  • running some self-defined hygiene tests

Here are some websites where you can search for ontologies:

Here are some tools you can use to check to quality of ontologies:

Some languages to define ontologies:

  • Common Logic is an ISO standard and first-order logic-based language
  • OWL2 is a W3C standard and description logic-based language

Some links about ontology modelling patterns:

About transforming relational data to RDF:

  • Logical Models to Ontologies is doable but Physical (Relational) Models to Ontologies is not doable. Physical (Relational) Models are what the schema is derived from. So this means schema to Ontology is not doable.

Some other links: