Determining Fitness-For-Use of Ontologies through Change

Management, Versioning and Publication Best Practices

Patrick West1 (westp@rpi.edu), Stephan Zednik1 (zednix2@rpi.edu), Linyun Fu1 (ful2@rpi.edu), Marshall Ma1 (max7@rpi.edu), Peter Fox1 (

pfox@cs.rpi.edu), (1Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute 110 8th St., Troy, NY, 12180 United States)

Poster: IN41C-1708Glossary:RPI – Rensselaer Polytechnic InstituteTWC – Tetherless World Constellation

at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Acknowledgments:Deborah L. McGuinness and Jim Hendler, authors and innovators of the Semantic Web and Ontology Development

Sponsors:

There is a large and growing number of domain ontologies available for researchers to leverage in their applications. When evaluating the use of an ontology it is important to not only consider whether the concepts and relationships defined in the ontology meet the requirements for purpose of use, but also how the change management, versioning and publication practices followed by the ontology publishers affect the maturity, stability, and long-term fitness-for-use of the ontology.

In this presentation we share our experiences and a list of best practices we have developed when determining fitness for use of existing ontologies, and the process we follow when developing of our own ontologies and extensions to existing ontologies. Our experience covers domains such as solar terrestrial physics, geophysics and oceanography; and the use of general purpose ontologies such as those with representations of people, organizations, data catalogs, observations and measurements and provenance. We will cover how we determine ontology scope, manage ontology change, specify ontology version, and what best practices we follow for ontology publication and use. The implications of following these best practices is that the ontologies we use and develop are mature, stable, have a well-defined scope, and are published in accordance with linked data principles.

Abstract

Change Management Versioning

Publication

Why is this important?Meaning, Perspective, Understanding

• It is important to clearly define concepts and relationships between concepts in an ontology.

• When an organization decides to use an ontology it is because the meanings of the concepts and the relationships between the concepts meets their needs.

• ,More importantly the ontology meets the end user’s perspective and understanding.

• To change any one of the concepts, the meaning of the concepts or the relationships between the concepts has the potential to alter the semantics enough so that it no longers meets the needs, perspective or understanding of the end users.

• For this reason it is important to manage change of ontologies responsibly with the needs of the end user in mind.

Documenting changes to ontologies

Ontology Change Proposal Template:• https://goo.gl/zQBNul

Example Ontology Change Proposal:• https://goo.gl/ZkuFjG

The various components of the change proposal should be clear enough that it doesn’t have to be clarified

Version of an ontology consists of the same three components of a software version. Major, minor and revision

Major number increment• Class hierarchy is changed• Meaning of a concept is changed• Meaning of a relationship is changed• New relationship between concepts that changes the meaning of the

concepts involved

Minor number increment• Relationship between concepts is changed but does not impact the

meaning of the concepts involved

Revision number increment• Minor modification to the meaning of a concept or

relationship• Typo corrections in concept or relationship names• Typo corrections in description of concepts or relationships

Should a concept or relationship between concepts ever be deleted? That’s a very good question that requires more space than available here.

From our experience deleting of a concept or relationship between concepts is not recommended

Example Ontology• http://tw.rpi.edu/schema

Ontology annotations provided• Ontology name• Description• Publishing organization• Creators• Contributors• Contact information• Version information• License Information

Concept and Relationships clearly defined• Name is representative of meaning• Description is clear and detailed

URI of the ontology should be resolvable• Provide a link to the latest version• Users might not be ready for your changes, so need to keep

older versions of the ontology available.

Content negotiation enabled for different format requests• HTML• TTL• N3• JSON-LD• RDF/XML

Citation should be provided

• What should that look like?

Question of Deletion

http://rpi.edu http://tw.rpi.edu