Supplementary material of the OntoPartS application


This page contains the supplementary files of the ESWC'12 paper concerning the software-supported selection of the most appropriate mereological, mereotopological, or meronymic relation--i.e., some part-whole relation--during ontology development. Details of the theory (focusing on mereotopology), design, implementation, and evaluation can be found in:

Keet, C.M., Fernández-Reyes, F.C., Morales-González, A. Representing mereotopological relations in OWL ontologies with OntoPartS. 9th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC'12), 27-31 May 2012, Heraklion, Crete, Greece. Springer, Lecture Notes in Computer Science LNCS 7295, 240-254.

---> visit us at the ESWC'12 demo session <---


Demos (videos)

  • The first demo uses a real ontology in Protégé 4.1 concerning the subject domain of travelling where a spatial object property is selected between CampSite and RuralArea, and the subsequent updating of the ontology after selection of the relation. OntoPartS demo (mp4, 1.1MB--low resolution), which is now also available in high resolution as avi (19MB).
  • The second (high resolution) demo uses a toy OWL file with a few concepts added in Protégé 4.0, were subsequently the appropriate part-whole relations are selected between Actor and Performance, between Climbing and ReachingMtEverestSummit, and between BorderProvince and Country. The aim is merely to illustrate relation selection and saving works across the whole extended taxonomy of part-whole and spatial relations. OntoPartS demo2 (zipped avi, 2.5MB).

Using OntoPartS locally

  • The current implementation is motivated by genericity of usage (principally for ontology development, but it could just as well be used to enhance the quality of conceptual data models) and ease of programming a prototype to demonstrate the software support for choosing the most appropriate part-whole relation. In short: the zip file contains the exe file of the OntoPartS application (15MB) and several dlls and you have to have installed the .NET framework on your machine in order to run it.
  • Additional features for OntoPartS are in the pipeline. It is planned to develop 'tailor-made' versions, such as a Protégé plugin or web-based version (provided there is interest).

OWL files

  • The OWL file MereoTopoD.owl has the object properties hierarchy in the RBox/object property box merged with a very slim version of DOLCE (a DOLCE ultra-light reduced to the bare taxonomy of categories) in the TBox. If one desires, this file can be used to develop one's own ontology (by importing it into your own ontology).

Activity diagram

There are several activity diagrams for OntoPartS. The one for selection of the mereotopological relations is shown in the figure below.



Developers

OntoPartS and the underlying ontological foundation and formal characterisation were developed principally by Francis C. Fernández-Reyes (CUJAE), C. Maria Keet (UKZN), and Annette Morales-González (CENATAV), and the first alpha verison also by Alexis Martínez Terrero (formely at CENATAV).