BFO decision diagram and alignment tool

How to align your domain ontology to a foundational ontology? It’s a well-known question, and one that I’ve looked into before as well. In some of that earlier work, we used DOLCE to align one’s ontology to. We devised the DOLCE decision diagram as part of the FORZA method to assist with the alignment process and implemented that in the MoKI ontology development tool [1]. MoKI is no more, but the theory and the algorithm’s design approach still stand. Instead of re-implementing it as a Protégé plugin and have it go defunct in a few years again (due to incompatible version upgrades, say), it sounded like more fun to design one for BFO and make a stand-alone tool out of it. And that design and the evaluation thereof is precisely what two of my ontology engineering course students—Chiadika Emeruem and Steve Wang—did for their mini-project of the course. That was then finalised and implemented in a tool for general use as part of the DOT4D project extension for my (award-winning) OE textbook afterward.

More precisely, as first part, there’s a diagram specifically for BFO – well, for one of its 2.0-ish versions in existence at least. Deciding on which version to use and what would be good questions was not as trivial as it may sound. While the questions seem to work (as evaluated with several ontologies), it might still be of use to set up an experiment to assess usability from a modeller’s viewpoint.

BFO ‘decision diagram’ to assist trying to align one’s class of a domain or core ontology to BFO (click to enlarge, or navigate to the user guide at https://bfo-classifier.github.io/)

Be this as it may, this decision diagram was incorporated into the tool that wraps around it with a nice interface with user guidance and feedback, and it has the option to load an ontology and save the alignment into the ontology (along with BFO). The decision tree itself is stored as a separate XML file so that it easily can be replaced with any update thereto, be it to reflect changes in question formulation or to adjust it to some later version of BFO. The stand-alone tool is a jar file that can be downloaded from the GitHub repo, and the repo also has the source code that may be used/adapted (i.e., has an open source licence). There’s also a user guide with explanations and screenshots. Here’s another screenshot of the tool in action:

Example of the BFO classifier in use, trying to align CODO’s ‘Disease’ to BFO, the trail of questions answered to get to ‘Disposition’, and the subsumption axiom that can be added to the ontology.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact either of us.

References

[1] Keet, C.M., Khan, M.T., Ghidini, C. Ontology Authoring with FORZA. 22nd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM’13). ACM proceedings, pp569-578. Oct. 27 – Nov. 1, 2013, San Francisco, USA.

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