How to develop ontologies using the NeOn Methodology and the NeOn Toolkit

Aldo Gangemi, Asunción Gómez-Pérez, Valentina Presutti, Mari Carmen Suárez-Figueroa
Abstract
General Description
Relevance to FIS 2010
Target Audience
Goals
Contents - Overview
Outline of Contents
Technical Requirements
Presenters

Abstract Top

Our tutorial targets ontology modelers and engineers. The tutorial will provide guidance for the development of ontologies with respect to the complete ontology lifecycle. We illustrate fundamental principles and best practices in ontology development using the NeOn Methodology for building ontology networks. We exercise ontology engineering activities using the NeOn toolkit, and specially the gOntt and the XD plug-ins.

General Description Top

Ontologies are considered a key technology that is employed whenever applications require semantic interoperability or integration of data and processes. Over the past years, semantic technologies have evolved and nowadays there are a number of concrete implementations. Using the knowledge gained from this evolution process now is a good time to establish best practices for ontology engineering activities.

The goal of our tutorial is twofold:

  • To teach software developers and ontology practitioners on methodological guidelines, including ontology design patterns, to help them to build better ontologies embedded in networks.
  • To teach software developers and ontology practitioners on how to use the NeOn toolkit during the development of ontology networks, and specially the gOntt and the XD plug-ins.

In the tutorial we target software developers and ontology practitioners who already have some experience in developing and using ontologies. We will illustrate in practical examples how they can benefit from using methodological guidelines included in the NeOn Methodology when developing ontologies. As the engineering tool, we will employ the NeOn toolkit with special emphasis in the gOntt and the XD plug-ins. The NeOn toolkit provides an extensible ontology engineering and management platform, allowing it to be easily integrated with existing infrastructures and adapted to specific application needs. Also, the full range of ontology lifecycle activities can be supported by using plug-ins providing all functionalities needed during the ontology engineering lifecycle. Particularly, the gOntt plug-in provides a tool (a) for scheduling ontology development projects and (b) for helping during the project by informing about the NeOn Methodology and about the plug-ins that can be used. Additionally, the XD plug-in provides the developer with guidelines on how to design ontologies using ontology design patterns (ODPs).

Our tutorial will consist of oral presentations, tool demonstrations through hands-on exercises, and a mini-project. While the presentations provide all conceptual foundations needed to build ontology networks, the hands-on exercises aim to increase the quality of the participants’ ontology engineering ability and familiarize them with methodologies and development tools. The practical part and the hands-on exercises will be centered on the NeOn Methodology through the NeOn toolkit, using the gOntt plug-in and the XD plug-in.

Relevance to FIS 2010 Top

Ontology engineering is of central importance to the Semantic Web community. It is envisioned that the Semantic Web of the future will be characterized by using a very large number of ontologies embedded in ontology networks built collaboratively by distributed teams. Such networks could include ontologies that already exist or they could be developed by reusing other available knowledge resources built by others. In this context, it is important to provide both strong methodological and technological support for the collaborative and context-sensitive development of ontology networks.

IIn our tutorial, we teach a methodology and a toolkit for building ontology networks, taking into account collaborative, dynamic, contextual and distributed aspects to ontology engineers.

Target Audience Top

Our target audience includes software developers, ontology practitioners, professional users with a commercial background, individual non-professional users as well as scientists. The tutorial will provide more benefit to those already familiar with W3C standards and having first experience in developing and using ontologies.

Goals Top

The tutorial will

  • each methodological guidelines and best practices in ontology engineering, and
  • • make ontology engineers familiar with the NeOn Methodology and the NeOn toolkit, and specially with the gOntt plug-in and the XD plug-in.

Contents - Overview Top

We will start with an introduction to a variety of use cases for applications of ontologies to motivate participants in how and when to use ontologies. Based on these use cases we will illustrate a typical ontology lifecycle and discuss specific ontology lifecycle activities, such as ontology conceptualization, selection and reuse of different knowledge resources, and ontology evaluation. After that, we will present the NeOn Methodology for building ontology networks, focused on the following subset of activities: ontology requirements specification, ontological resource reuse, ontology design pattern reuse, non-ontological resource reuse and reengineering, ontology evaluation and ontology localization. We will provide methodological guidelines for the aforementioned activities using the gOntt plug-in.

We will introduce participants to the use of the toolkit by directly experiencing it in a hands-on activities, in order to take a closer look at how the lifecycle activities are realized using the NeOn toolkit with several plug-ins: gOntt, Watson, XD, and Label Translator, as well as with the ontologydesignpatterns.org portal. In the mini-project, the participants will work on practical activities from a real world use case.

Detailed Outline of Contents and Schedule Top

The following is an outline of the contents of the tutorial:

  1. Overview of use cases for using ontologies
  2. NeOn Methodology overview, including pattern-based design
  3. NeOn toolkit overview and functionalities, shown through the lenses of methodological guidelines. All guidelines will be experienced directly on the NeOn toolkin with gOntt.
  4. Mini-project: developing an ontology network on a realistic use case

Technical Requirements Top

Participants are expected to bring their personal laptops to be able to follow the hands-on exercises. The tutorial will require a copy of the NeOn toolkit software that will be provided by tutors.

The software will be both freely available for download on the web, as well as distributed by the presenters on CDs. The software features easy installation procedures, so it can be either installed by the participants beforehand, or during the beginning of the tutorial.

Presenters Top

This tutorial will be presented by: Aldo Gangemi, Asunción Gómez-Pérez, Valentina Presutti, and Mari Carmen Suárez-Figueroa.

  • Aldo Gangemi is senior researcher at the CNR Institute for Cognitive Sciences and Technology in Rome (IT) and head of the Semantic Technology Lab (STLab) . His research focuses on collaborative ontology design, lexical semantics, and semantic interoperability. He has a large international publication, conference organization, and teaching track, and has been involved in several projects funded by the European Union, governmental organizations, and industrial companies (either as research partner or consultant). He has coordinated the CNIPA Working Group for the Standardization of Metadata and Semantics in the e-Services of Italian Public Administration, and the W3C Task Force on Porting WordNet to the Semantic Web. Besides conferences and workshops, he has co-organized many tutorials on ontology design, evaluation and best practices in both academic and enterprise contexts. The STLab is currently a partner in the EU projects NeOn (http://www.neon-project.org), IKS (http://www.iks-project.eu), and BONy (http://www.bonynetwork.eu/), and coordinates the CNR research programmes Semantic IntraWeb, Semantic Scouting, and Historical Knowledge Representation.

  • Prof. Dr. Asunción Gómez-Pérez is Full Professor at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM), Director of the Ontology Engineering Group at UPM, and Director of the Artificial Intelligence Department at Facultad de Informática at UPM. She has a B.A. in Computer Science (1990), M.S.C. on Knowledge Engineering (1991), Ph.D. in Computer Sciences (1993) and MS.C. on Business Administration (1994). She was visiting (1994-1995) the Knowledge Systems Laboratory at Stanford University. She also was the Executive Director (1995-1998) of the Artificial Intelligent Laboratory at the School. She led at UPM the following EU projects: MKBEEM, Ontoweb, Esperonto, Knowledge Web, NeOn, SEEMP, OntoGrid, Admire, Dynalearn, SemSorGrid4Env, SEALS, and Monnet; and she coordinated (OntoGrid, SemSorGrid4Env, and SEALS). She has published more than 150 papers and she is author of one book on Ontological Engineering and co-author of a book on Knowledge Engineering. She has been co-director of the summer school on Ontological Engineering and the Semantic Web since 2003 up to now. She was program chair of ASWC'09, ESWC’05 and EKAW’02 and co-organiser of many workshops on ontologies. She reviews papers in many conferences and journals

  • Valentina Presutti received her Ph.D in Computer Science in 2006 at the University of Bologna (Italy). Currently, she is a researcher at the Semantic Technology Lab (STLab) of the National Research Council (CNR) in Rome (IT). She is one of the key researchers in the EU funded projects NeOn and IKS, and she started the ontologydesignpatterns.org initiative, which she actively participates in as one of the editors in chief. She has published in international journals/conferences/workshops on topics such as Semantic Web and ontology design. She also teaches software engineering at the University of Rome "La Sapienza", and works as consultant for private as well as public organizations. Her research interests include Semantic Web, ontology design, collaborative knowledge/content management, and ontology-based software engineering. She has co-organized many tutorials on ontology design, evaluation and best practices in both academic and enterprise contexts.

  • Dr. Mari Carmen Suárez-Figueroa belongs to the Ontology Engineering Group of the Artificial Intelligence Department of the Computer Science School at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (ES). She graduated in Computer Science from UPM in 2001. She was Associate Professor (January-March 2002) and she is Teaching Assistant from 1st September 2008 at the Computer Science School at UPM. She received the PhD in Artificial Intelligence in UPM in June 2010.Her research activities include methodologies for ontology (network) development, ontology (network) development, ontology development tools, ontology evaluation, and the Semantic Web. She has participated or is currently participating at different European and national projects: OntoWeb (IST-2000-29243), Esperonto (IST-2001-34373), PIKON (IST-2001-33487), Knowledge Web (FP6-507482), OntoGrid (FP6-511513), REIMDOC (FIT-340100-2004-22), SEEMP (IST-4-027347-STP), NeOn (FP6-027595), mIO! (CENIT 2008-1019), and BuscaMedia (CENIT 2009-1026). She has been research visitor at Department of Computer Science (University of Liverpool) in 2004 and at KMi at the Open University in 2007. She co-organized the EON 2006 Workshop at WWW’06, the KRRSW 2008 Workshop at ESWC 2008, the tutorial called “NeOn Methodology: how to build ontology networks?” at EKAW 2008, and the tutorial called “Ontology Engineering: the NeOn Methodology through the NeOn toolkit” at ISWC 2009.