Angela Locoro

Automatic Ontology Matching via Upper Ontologies: A Systematic Evaluation

¿Ontology matching¿ is the process of finding correspondences between entities belonging to different ontologies. This paper describes a set of algorithms that exploit upper ontologies as semantic bridges in the ontology matching process and presents a systematic analysis of the relationships among features of matched ontologies (number of simple and composite concepts, stems, concepts at the top level, common English suffixes and prefixes, and ontology depth), matching algorithms, used upper ontologies, and experiment results. This analysis allowed us to state under which circumstances the exploitation of upper ontologies gives significant advantages with respect to traditional approaches that do no use them. We run experiments with SUMO-OWL (a restricted version of SUMO), OpenCyc, and DOLCE. The experiments demonstrate that when our ¿structural matching method via upper ontology¿ uses an upper ontology large enough (OpenCyc, SUMO-OWL), the recall is significantly improved while preserving the precision obtained without upper ontologies. Instead, our ¿nonstructural matching method¿ via OpenCyc and SUMO-OWL improves the precision and maintains the recall. The ¿mixed method¿ that combines the results of structural alignment without using upper ontologies and structural alignment via upper ontologies improves the recall and maintains the F-measure independently of the used upper ontology.

źMade with Knowledgeź

Knowledge Artifact (KA) is an analytical construct by which analysts, researchers and designers from different disciplines usually denote those material objects that in organizations regard the creation, use, sharing and representation of knowledge. This paper aims to fill a gap in the existing literature by providing a conceptual framework for the interpretation of the heterogeneous contributions on this concept in the specialist literature. From our survey of the main contributions to the definition of this concept, we outline a spectrum of stances laying between two theoretical extremes: we denote one pole “representational”, as it is grounded on the idea that knowledge can be an “object per se”; and the other pole “socially situated”, as it builds on the viewpoint seeing knowledge as a social practice, that is an epiphenomenon of a situated, context-dependent and performative interaction of human actors through and with “objects of knowing”. In proposing a unifying model to gather complementary dimensions of knowledge together, our aim is to shed light on the multiple ways these ideas can inform the “reification” of knowledge into particular IT artifacts, which we call IT Knowledge Artifact (ITKA), and on how seemingly irreconcilable positions can contribute in the design of these computational artifact supporting knowledge work in organizations.

Context-Based Matching: Design of a Flexible Framework and Experiment

Context-based matching finds correspondences between entities from two ontologies by relating them to other resources. A general view of context-based matching is designed by analysing existing such matchers. This view is instantiated in a path-driven approach that (a) anchors the ontologies to external ontologies, (b) finds sequences of entities (path) that relate entities to match within and across these resources, and (c) uses algebras of relations for combining the relations obtained along these paths. Parameters governing such a system are identified and made explicit. They are used to conduct experiments with different parameter configurations to assess their influence. In particular, experiments confirm that restricting the set of ontologies reduces the time taken at the expense of recall and F-measure. Increasing path length within ontologies increases recall and F-measure as well. In addition, algebras of relations allow for a finer analysis, which shows that increasing path length provides more correct or non precise correspondences, but marginally increases incorrect correspondences.

Defining positioning in a core ontology for robotics

Unambiguous definition of spatial position and orientation has crucial importance for robotics. In this paper we propose an ontology about positioning. It is part of a more extensive core ontology being developed by the IEEE RAS Working Group on ontologies for robotics and automation. The core ontology should provide a common ground for further ontology development in the field. We give a brief overview of concepts in the core ontology and then describe an integrated approach for representing quantitative and qualitative position information.

Questionnaires in the design and evaluation of community-oriented technologies

Stimulated by the maturity and ease-of-use of online psychometric questionnaire platforms, in this paper we discuss their exploitation as tools to gather representative indications, collect preferences and elicit requirements from the members of online communities for the design of their web-based technologies. To this practical aim, we suggest an alternative vision to the traditional way of considering questionnaires as part of the quantitative researcher toolbox, or worse yet, a trivial way to collect opinions with no design-oriented value. Rather, we advocate for a qualitative turn in questionnaire design and for the interpretation of the responses collected from even massive communities of prospective users. In particular, we propose to see questionnaires as valuable tools for two related tasks: the collection of preferences for the prioritisation of features and requirements of prospective web-based systems; and the evaluation of the impact of these systems on the communities that adopt them. In particular, this impact is addressed on a multidimensional perspective, including community values such as trust, sense of reciprocity, sense of community and social capital. In both cases, questionnaires are lightweight, feasible and cost-effective tools to enable the incremental improvement of community-oriented technologies according to the direct feedback collected from the community members.

MANENT: An Infrastructure for Integrating, Structuring and Searching Digital Libraries

Digital Libraries represent the commitment of research communities to preserve authoritative and well structured sources of knowledge, and to share archival organisations, methods and resources thanks to systems relying on standard metadata formats. This chapter describes some natural language processing techniques exploited for automatically extracting structural information from documents stored in Digital Libraries, based on the exposed metadata. The most prominent results achieved in this area are surveyed and discussed. As an example of an infrastructure for integrating, structuring and searching Digital Libraries based on natural language processing and semantic web techniques, we discuss the MANENT system. MANENT is a working prototype offering services of Digital Library content management and record classification and retrieval. It is hosted on a server at the Computer Science Department of Genova University and, starting from 2011, it will become publicly available. 475,000 records drawn from 138 repositories that all over the world expose OAI-PMH services have been downloaded, stored, and their automatic classification is under way.

MUSE: MUltilinguality and SEmantics for the Citizens of the World

This paper discusses some of the challenges raised by multilinguality in the Public Administration field and shows how the MUSE system addresses them by combining speech to text, text to speech, and machine translation techniques, utilizing domain ontologies throughout a complex system designed as a Multi-Agent System and deployed by exploiting resources in the Cloud. The design of MUSE is finished and its implementation and unit testing are under way. On completion of these two stages, MUSE will be experimented in the Registry Office of Genoa Municipality which is supporting this activity by providing the authors with data, advice on the domain, and the opportunity to test MUSE on the field. The final purpose of this work is to make MUSE’s services available to all the foreign citizens interacting with Genoa Municipality’s Registry Office. The two languages currently supported are Spanish and Italian. Due to the high modularity of MUSE’s architecture, a limited effort will be required to add other languages in the future, if the on site experimentation will be successful.

BOwL: exploiting Boolean operators and lesk algorithm for linking ontologies

BOwL applies word sense disambiguation techniques for tagging ontology entities with WordNet words. Boolean operators that appear in names of ontology entities are interpreted based on their semantics and are used during the ontology matching stage accordingly. Experimental results are shown, demonstrating the feasibility of the approach.

Tagging ontologies with fuzzy wordnet domains

The use of WordNet Domains is confined in the present days to Text Mining field. Moreover, the tagging of WordNet synsets with WordNet Domain labels is a crisp one. This paper introduces an approach for automatically tagging both ontologies and their concepts with WordNet domains in a fuzzy fashion, for topic classification purposes. Our fuzzy WordNet Domains model is presented as well as our domain disambiguation procedure. Experiments show promising results and are introduced in this paper as well as a final discussion on envisioned scenarios for our approach.

From Care for Design to Becoming Matters : New Perspectives for the Development of Socio-technical Systems

In this paper, we start by deconstructing the widely-mentioned concept of care in the IS literature, to unveil its inherent shortcomings and ambiguities, and find opportunities to go beyond it while preserving its value for the development of better socio-technical systems. We find an important strand in the feminist studies tradition, and in particular in the contributions related to the so called “new materialism”. Notwithstanding their differences, these contrarian and often neglected voices point to the importance of relational thinking and material engagement with our technological objects. For this reason, in continuing the path indicated by Ciborra with his idea of care, we advocate a new shift from this step to the next one, where becoming matters more than being, and the caring about matter is more important than design abstractions.