On heterogeneous mappings between ontologies

Representing information and knowledge often can be done in different ways even when the same representation language is used. In some cases, one way of representing it is always better than another—or: the other option is sub-optimal or plain wrong—but in other cases the distinction is not all that clear-cut. For instance, whether to represent ‘Employee’ as a subclass of ‘Person’ or that it inheres in ‘Person’. Now, if two ontologies (or conceptual models) represent it differently but they have to be aligned, then how to find such different modelling patterns and how to align them? And, taking a step back: which alternate modelling patterns are there, and why those? We sought to answer these questions, whose outcome will be presented (and appear in the proceedings of [1]) the 14th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC’17) that will take place later this month in Portoroz, Slovenia.

Setting aside the formal stuff in this blog post, let’s first have a look at some of those different modelling patterns. At it’s core, there are 1) modelling practices in ontologies vs conceptual models and 2) foundational [or: top-level, or upper] ontology guidance vs being ‘compacter’ in representing the knowledge. The generalisations of the following handwaivy examples are described in more detail in the paper, but for this blog post, it hopefully will do as a teaser of the six formalised patterns. Take, e.g., the following examples that are all variations on the same theme: to-reify-or-not-to-reify, where the example in B is further dressed up with content from a foundational ontology:

Indeed, in the examples, what is shown on the left-hand side does not have the exact same information content as what is shown on the right-hand side, but the underlying conceptualization is pretty much the same. The models on the right-hand side are more precise, for one has the opportunity to specify those, like stating that a particular marriage is between two persons (so, no group marriages allowed). Whether one always needs such more precise constraints is a separate matter.

Then there’s the Employee example mentioned in this post’s introduction with two alternate ways of representing it:

That is, a modeller chooses between representing the role an object performs/has as a subclass of that object or in a separate hierarchy of roles. Foundational ontologies take the latter option, domain ontologies the former.

These examples are instantiations of small modelling patterns (of which there may be more than the six formalised in the paper). To devise mappings between them, one ends up with alignments in such a way that they are between two patterns, rather than 1:1 mappings. To get there, we had to take some preliminary steps on how to represent it all formally, such as specifying the language for a pattern and a defining an ontology pattern alignment. This allowed us to formalise the patterns and devise that formal specification of the heterogeneous alignments.

That outcome, in turn, feeds into the alignment pattern search and checking algorithms. The algorithms show that it is feasible to find those patterns automatically, which then can propose possible alignments to the modeller, and that, upon aligning, one can check whether that’s done correctly. For instance, take the following two ontologies graphically represented in an (extended, enhanced) ICOM tool:

Two inter-ontology assertions have been made, pointed out with the two yellow arrows; i.e., ‘Tennis’ is a subclass of ‘Tournament’ and ‘TennisPlayer’ is a subclass of ‘Athlete’. The pattern search algorithm then will try to find instantiations for the small modelling patterns for alignment. Once something is found—in this case, pattern A fits—it will check whether all conditions for the alignment can be satisfied, and if so, it will propose a possible alignment, which is shown in the following illustrative figure:

Of interest here is, perhaps, the ‘new’ object property being proposed, indicated with the yellow arrow, that amounts to an equivalence to the partOf+Match+played. (That threesome can’t be mapped as equivalent to ‘participated’ due to differences in domain and range axioms, and drawing three subsumption lines from ‘participated’ to ‘part of’, ‘Match’, and ‘played’ is awkward.). The algorithms’ output then thus reduces the alignment into a final question to the modeller along the line of “are you ok with the alignment between the purple elements in the two diagrams?”, and accept or reject it. Please refer to the paper for further details.

The principles presented could possibly be used also for refactoring of an ontology, like in TDD [2] or when ‘preparing’ an ontology to align to a foundational ontology. More results on this topic are in the pipeline, and if you want to know now already, we can have a chat at ESWC.

References

[1] Fillottrani, P.R., Keet, C.M. Patterns for Heterogeneous TBox Mappings to Bridge Different Modelling Decisions. 14th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC’17). Springer LNCS. Portoroz, Slovenia, May 28 – June 2, 2017. (in print)

[2] Keet, C.M., Lawrynowicz, A. Test-Driven Development of Ontologies. In: Proceedings of the 13th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC’16). Springer LNCS 9678, 642-657. 29 May – 2 June, 2016, Crete, Greece.

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