Orchestrating 28 logical theories of mereo(topo)logy

Parts and wholes, again. This time it’s about the logic-aspects of theories of parthood (cf. aligning different hierarchies of (part-whole) relations and make them compatible with foundational ontologies). I intended to write this post before the Ninth Conference on Knowledge Capture (K-CAP 2017), where the paper describing the new material would be presented by my co-author, Oliver Kutz. Now, afterwards, I can add that “Orchestrating a Network of Mereo(topo) logical Theories” [1] even won the Best Paper Award. The novelties, in broad strokes, are that we figured out and structured some hitherto messy and confusing state of affairs, showed that one can do more than generally assumed especially with a new logics orchestration framework, and we proposed first steps toward conflict resolution to sort out expressivity and logic limitations trade-offs. Constructing a tweet-size “tl;dr” version of the contents is not easy, and as I have as much space here on my blog as I like, it ended up to be three paragraphs here: scene-setting, solution, and a few examples to illustrate some of it.

 

Problems

As ontologists know, parthood is used widely in ontologies across most subject domains, such as biomedicine, geographic information systems, architecture, and so on. Ontology (the philosophers) offer a parthood relation that has a bunch of computationally unpleasant properties that are structured in a plethora of mereologicial and meretopological theories such that it has become hard to see the forest for the trees. This is then complicated in practice because there are multiple logics of varying expressivity (support more or less language features), with the result that only certain fragments of the mereo(topo)logical theories can be represented. However, it’s mostly not clear what can be used when, during the ontology authoring stage one may want to have all those features so as to check correctness, and it’s not easy to predict what will happen when one aligns ontologies with different fragments of mereo(topo)logy.

 

Solution

We solved these problems by specifying a structured network of theories formulated in multiple logics that are glued together by the various linking constructs of the Distributed Ontology, Model, and Specification Language (DOL). The ‘structured network of theories’-part concerns all the maximal expressible fragments of the KGEMT mereotopological theory and five of its most well-recognised sub-theories (like GEM and MT) in the seven Description Logics-based OWL species, first-order logic, and higher order logic. The ‘glued together’-part refers to relating the resultant 28 theories within DOL (in Ontohub), which is a non-trivial (understatement, unfortunately) metalanguage that has the constructors for the glue, such as enabling one to declare to merge two theories/modules represented in different logics, extending a theory (ontology) with axioms that go beyond that language without messing up the original (expressivity-restricted) ontology, and more. Further, because the annoying thing of merging two ontologies/modules can be that the merged ontology may be in a different language than the two original ones, which is very hard to predict, we have a cute proof-of-concept tool so that it assists with steps toward resolution of language feature conflicts by pinpointing profile violations.

 

Examples

The paper describes nine mechanisms with DOL and the mereotopological theories. Here I’ll start with a simple one: we have Minimal Topology (MT) partially represented in OWL 2 EL/QL in “theory8” where the connection relation (C) is just reflexive (among other axioms; see table in the paper for details). Now what if we add connection’s symmetry, which results in “theory4”? First, we do this by not harming theory8, in DOL syntax (see also the ESSLI’16 tutorial):

logic OWL2.QL
ontology theory4 =
theory8
then
ObjectProperty: C Characteristics: Symmetric %(t7)

What is the logic of theory4? Still in OWL, and if so, which species? The Owl classifier shows the result:

 

Another case is that OWL does not let one define an object property; at best, one can add domain and range axioms and the occasional ‘characteristic’ (like aforementioned symmetry), for allowing arbitrary full definitions pushes it out of the decidable fragment. One can add them, though, in a system that can handle first order logic, such as the Heterogeneous toolset (Hets); for instance, where in OWL one can add only “overlap” as a primitive relation (vocabulary element without definition), we can take such a theory and declare that definition:

logic CASL.FOL
ontology theory20 =
theory6_plus_antisym_and_WS
then %wdef
. forall x,y:Thing . O(x,y) <=> exists z:Thing (P(z,x) /\ P(z,y)) %(t21)
. forall x,y:Thing . EQ(x,y) <=> P(x,y) /\ P(y,x) %(t22)

As last example, let me illustrate the notion of the conflict resolution. Consider theory19—ground mereology, partially—that is within OWL 2 EL expressivity and theory18—also ground mereology, partially—that is within OWL 2 DL expressivity. So, they can’t be the same; the difference is that theory18 has parthood reflexive and transitive and proper parthood asymmetric and irreflexive, whereas theory19 has both parthood and proper parthood transitive. What happens if one aligns the ontologies that contain these theories, say, O1 (with theory18) and O2 (with theory19)? The Owl classifier provides easy pinpointing and tells you the profile: OWL 2 full (or: first order logic, or: beyond OWL 2 DL—top row) and why (bottom section):

Now, what can one do? The conflict resolution cannot be fully automated, because it depends on what the modeller wants or needs, but there’s enough data generated already and there are known trade-offs so that it is possible to describe the consequences:

• Choose the O1 axioms (with irreflexivity and asymmetry on proper part of), which will make the ontology interoperable with other ontologies in OWL 2 DL, FOL or HOL.
• Choose O2’s axioms (with transitivity on part of and proper part of), which will facilitate linking to ontologies in OWL 2 RL, 2 EL, 2 DL, FOL, and HOL.
• Choose to keep both sets will result in an OWL 2 Full ontology that is undecidable, and it is then compatible only with FOL and HOL ontologies.

As serious final note: there’s still fun to be had on the logic side of things with countermodels and sub-networks and such, and with refining the conflict resolution to assist ontology engineers better. (or: TBC)

As less serious final note: the working title of early drafts of the paper was “DOLifying mereo(topo)logy”, but at some point we chickened out and let go of that frivolity.

 

References

[1] Keet, C.M., Kutz, O. Orchestrating a Network of Mereo(topo)logical Theories. Ninth International Conference on Knowledge Capture (K-CAP’17), Austin, Texas, USA, December 4-6, 2017. ACM Proceedings.

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Part-whole relations and foundational ontologies

Part-whole relations seem like a never-ending story—and it still doesn’t bore me. In this case, the ingredients were the taxonomy of part-whole relations [1] and a couple of foundational ontologies and the aim was to link the former to the latter. But what started off with the intention to write just a short workshop note, for seemingly clear and just in need of actually doing it, turned out to be not so straightforward after all. The selected foundational ontologies were not as compatible as assumed, and creating the corresponding orchestration of OWL files was a ‘non-trivial exercise’.

What were (some of) the issues? On the one hand, there are multiple part-whole relations, which are typically named differently when they have a specific domain or range. For instance, to relate a process to a sub-process (e.g., eating involves chewing), to relate a region to a region it contains, relating portions of stuff, and so on. Those relations are fairly well established in the literature. What they do demand for, however, is clarity as to what those categories really are. For instance, with the process example, is that to be understood as Process as meant in the DOLCE ontology, or, say, Process in BFO? What if a foundational ontology does not have a category needed for a commonly used part-whole relation?

The first step to answer such questions was to assess several foundational ontologies on 1) which of the part-whole relations they have now, and which categories are present that are needed for the domain and range declarations for those common part-whole relations. I assessed that for DOLCE, BFO, GFO, SUMO, GIST, and YAMATO. This foundational ontology comparison is summarised in tables 1 and 2 in the paper that emanated from the assessment [2], entitled “A note on the compatibility of part-whole relations with foundational ontologies” that I recently presented at FOUST-II: 2nd Workshop on Foundational Ontology, Joint Ontology Workshops 2017 in Bolzano, Italy. In short: none fits perfectly for various reasons, but there are more and less suitable ontologies for a possible alignment. DOLCE and SUMO were evaluated to have the best approximations. It appeared at the workshops presentation’s Q&A session, where two of the DOLCE developers were present, that the missing Collective was an oversight, or: the ontology is incomplete and it was not an explicit design choice to exclude it. This, then, would make DOLCE the best/easiest fit.

I’ll save you the trials and tribulations creating the orchestrated OWL files. The part-whole relations, their inverses, and their proper parthood versions were manually linked to modules of DOLCE and SUMO, and automatically linked to BFO and GFO. That was an addition of 49 relations (OWL object properties) and 121 logical axioms, which were then extended further with another 11 mereotopological relations and its 16 logical axioms. These files are accessible online directly here and also listed with brief descriptions.

While there is something usable now and, by design at least, these files are reusable as well, what it also highlighted is that there are still some outstanding questions, as there already were for the top-level categories of previously aligned foundational ontologies [3]. For instance, some categories seem the same, but they’re in ‘incompatible’ parts of the taxonomy (located in disjoint branches), so then either not the same after all, or this happened unintentionally. Only GIST has been updated recently, and it may be useful if the others foundational ontologies were to be as well, so as to obtain clarity on these issues. The full interaction of part-whole relations with classical mereology is not quite clear either: there are various extensions and deviations, such as specifically for portions [4,5], but one for processes may be interesting as well. Not that such prospective theories would be usable as-is in OWL ontology development, but there are more expressive languages that start having tooling support where it could be an interesting avenue for future work. I’ll write more about the latter in an upcoming post (covering the K-CAP 2017 paper that was recently accepted).

On a last note: the Joint Ontology Workshops (JOWO 2017) was a great event. Some 100 ontologists from all over the world attended. There were good presentations, lively conversations, and it was great to meet up again with researchers I had not seen for years, finally meet people I knew only via email, and make new connections. It will not be an easy task to surpass this event next year at FOIS 2018 in Cape Town.

 

References

 

[1] Keet, C.M., Artale, A. Representing and Reasoning over a Taxonomy of Part-Whole Relations. Applied Ontology, 2008, 3(1-2):91-110.

[2] Keet, C.M. A note on the compatibility of part-whole relations with foundational ontologies. FOUST-II: 2nd Workshop on Foundational Ontology, Joint Ontology Workshops 2017, 21-23 September 2017, Bolzano, Italy. CEUR-WS Vol. (in print)

[3] Khan, Z.C., Keet, C.M. Foundational ontology mediation in ROMULUS. Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management: IC3K 2013 Selected Papers. A. Fred et al. (Eds.). Springer CCIS vol. 454, pp. 132-152, 2015. preprint

[4] Donnelly, M., Bittner, T. Summation relations and portions of stuff. Philosophical Studies, 2009, 143, 167-185.

[5] Keet, C.M. Relating some stuff to other stuff. 20th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW’16). Blomqvist, E., Ciancarini, P., Poggi, F., Vitali, F. (Eds.). Springer LNAI vol. 10024, 368-383. 19-23 November 2016, Bologna, Italy.