Tutorial venue and time
see final program
The organisers asked me to cover two topics, both of which are described on this page:
- Towards principles and methods for good ontologies (details)
- Foundations of accessing data through ontologies (details)
Towards principles and methods for good ontologies
Aims
The main aim of the lecture is to present foundations of the notion of what makes an ontology a 'good' ontology regarding the representation of the subject domain and introduce methods and techniques that can assist achieving that.Intended audience
The intended audience are mainly postgraduate students and interested academics who would like to gain an appreciation of linking ontologies to data (or vv).Background/prerequisites: participants will gain more from the tutorial if they have a basic foundation in modelling.
Materials
The course material consists of:- Lecture slides: pdf
- Reading material for the tutorial, before or after: see below
- Materials for the hands-on session:
- Exercises: see this pdf
- Ontologies: sample test files and answers are available in this folder (and here)
- Software: Protégé 5.x and the OWL Classifier (standalone jar file); optionally: the DL axiom renderer (Protégé plugin) and the BFO Classifier (standalone jar file) and other tools that may be of use
Supplementary reading
Annotated resources you may find of interest for further reading:- Chapter 5 and Chapter 6 of the introduction to ontology engineering textbook (and referneces therein), on methods and methodologies and the top-down approach to ontology development
- How to align a domain ontology to a foundational ontology, be it to DOLCE or to BFO: Bernabé CH, Keet CM, Khan ZC, Mahlaza Z. A method to improve alignments between domain and foundational ontologies. 13th International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems 2023 (FOIS'23). IOS Press, FAIA vol. (in print). Keet CM, Khan MT, 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.
- Choosing your modelling language: Fillottrani PR, Keet CM. An analysis of commitments in ontology language design. 11th International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems 2020 (FOIS'20). Brodaric, B and Neuhaus, F. (Eds.). IOS Press, FAIA vol. 330, 46-60. September, 2020, Bolzano, Italy.
- On the semantics of relations and trying to enforce that in the 'role box': Keet, C.M. Detecting and Revising Flaws in OWL Object Property Expressions. 18th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW'12), A. ten Teije et al. (Eds.). Oct 8-12, Galway, Ireland. Springer, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence LNAI 7603, 252-266.
- Heuristics for improving the quality of one's oneology: Poveda-Villalon M, Suarez-Figueroa MC, Gomez-Perez A. Validating ontologies with OOPS! Proc. of the 18th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW’12). LNAI, vol. 7603, pp. 267–281. Springer (2012). and tips for how to avoid such pitfalls: Keet CM, Suárez-Figueroa MC, Poveda-Villalón M. Pitfalls in Ontologies and TIPS to Prevent Them. Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management: IC3K 2013 Selected Papers. A. Fred et al. (Eds.). Springer CCIS vol. 454, pp. 115-131, 2015.
Foundations of accessing data through ontologies
Aims and content
The main aim of the lecture is to provide an overview of the principal approaches of accessing data through an ontology.Four approaches will be presented, each with their strengths and weaknesses so as to enable the participant to make an informed choice. It will then zoom in on the mapping and transformation approaches with some technical detail. They will be illustrated with examples and use cases from various subject domains.
Intended audience
The intended audience are mainly postgraduate students and interested academics who would like to gain an appreciation of linking ontologies to data (or vv).Background/prerequisites: participants will gain more from the tutorial if they have a basic foundation in ontologies and databases. It is assumed one knows what a database is and has at least come across conceptual data models (such as UML, EER, ORM).
Materials
The course material consists of:- Lecture slides: pdf (note: only sections 1 and 2 were covered in the 45 minute lecture and made available here. Sections 3 and 4 aimed to provide a flavour of the basic formal foundations of the mapping-based approach with rewriting (see also Calvanese et al (2009), below) and to illustrate steps to carry out to create such a system)
- Reading material for the tutorial, before or after: see below
- Materials for the optional hands-on session in the BarCamp part of the summer school: a tutorial to set up an OBDA system with Ontop using research data about elephants in the Kruger park. Alternatively: BYO database and ontology
Supplementary reading
Annotated resources you may find of interest for further reading:- Transformation-based approach and overview of approaches: Fillottrani PR, Keet CM. KnowID: An architecture for efficient Knowledge-driven Information and Data access. Data Intelligence, 2020, 2(4): 487-512.
- Chapter 8 of the introduction to ontology engineering textbook, on ontology-based data access (gentle short intro)
- The reference paper for Ontop: Calvanese D, Cogrel B, Komla-Ebri S, Kontchakov R, Lanti D, Rezk M, Rodriguez-Muro M, Xiao G. Ontop: Answering SPARQL queries over relational databases. Semantic Web Journal, 8(3):471–487, 2017
- A relatively highly readable paper describing an application of OBDA: Calvanese D, Liuzzo P, Mosca A, Remesal J, Rezk M, Rull G. Ontology-based data integration in EPnet: Production and distribution of food during the roman empire. Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, 51:212-229, 2016.
- The first graphical querying-based OBDA: Calvanese D, Keet CM, Nutt W, Rodriguez-Muro M, Stefanoni G. Web-based Graphical Querying of Databases through an Ontology: the WONDER System. ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (ACM SAC'10), March 22-26 2010, Sierre, Switzerland. pp 1389-1396.
- A summer school-oriented technical overview of the mapping-based approach of OBDA: Calvanese D, De Giacomo G, Lembo D, Lenzerini M, Poggi A, Rodriguez-Muro M, Rosati R.Ontologies and databases: The DL-Lite approach. In Sergio Tessaris and Enrico Franconi, editors, Semantic Technologies for Information Systems - 5th Int. Reasoning Web Summer School (RW 2009), volume 5689 of LNCS, pp255-356. Springer, 2009.
BarCamp sessions
- Building ontologies hands-on session (see good ontologies materials, above).
- Bottom-up ontology development from conceptual data models: Section 7.1 and Figures 7.6-7.8 and Exercise 7.1 and 7.2 of the OE textbook.
- Temporal ontologies. Consisted of an overview, explorations and discussions. A starting point for further reading may be Section 10.2 of the OE textbook and the references included there.
- Experiment aligning a domain ontology to BFO. Tool and diagram and see references in the good ontologies section for more background information.