be.wi-ol.de

User-friendly ontology design

Nikolai DahlemUniversität Oldenburg

Outline

• Motivation• Goal• Criteria and requirements for user-friendly ontology

design• Concept Editor prototyp • Future work

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Motivation

'The productivity of knowledge and knowledge workers will not be the only competitive factor in the world economy. It is, however, likely to become the decisive factor, at least for most industries in the developed countries.‘ [Dru98]

'Although the Semantic Web has recently been gaining significant attention from both academia and industry, the amount of knowledge available in formal representations that are accessible by machines is still small compared to the "traditional" Web. A major reason for this is that Semantic Web technologies and tools require considerable technical expertise, and are thus not well suited for users outside the world of computer science.‘ [SGW06]

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Goal

Ontologies are a major building block of the semantic web, but they are too complex to be used by non-experts. Average users are using techniques like e.g. mind maps for externalizing knowledge.

To turn the semantic web into reality a critical mass of available formalized knowledge is needed.

Available ontologies are results of scientic or industrial projects

Ontologies are not used by the general public, in contrast to the so-called Web 2.0

Our goal: Make ontology creation as usable as the Web2.0

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Use cases

Provide a methodology and supporting tool, that:• enables average, non-expert users build simple

ontologies on their domains of interest.• enables domain experts to externalize their domain

knowledge without the help of an ontology engineer.• can be used by ontology engineers as simple and

flexible way to prototyp ontologies.

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Criteria

We identied criteria for user-friendly ontology design methodologies

Besides the methodologies themselves the criteria also cover aspects of ontology construction tools and the underlying ontology languages.

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Criteria

Criteria applying to methodologies:• Usage of adequate terminology• Structure• Descriptiveness• Transparency

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Criteria

Criteria applying to methodologies and tools:• Error avoidance• Robustness• Consistency• Conceptualization flexibility

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Criteria

Criteria applying to tools:• Lookahead features• Hiding of formality• Comprehensible presentation of ontology

assumptions

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Criteria

• Tool support indicates if a methodology is coherently implemented in a tool

• Expressiveness applies to the underlying ontology language and the subset of it used in the methodology

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Requirements

Usability: The methodology and tool should consider the central usability concepts: learnability, efficiency, memorability, error-handling and statisfaction

Effectiveness: Users should be enabled to convey their intented meaning as easy and intuitive as possible

Flexibility: Changes to the ontology should be possible at every development stage with minimum effort

Functional:• Formal methodology specification• Creation of ontologies with adequate expressiveness• Possibility to reuse existing ontologies• Graphical creation and editing of ontologies• Automatic consistency checking• Interactive user guidance

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ConceptEditor – Desktop metaphor

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ConceptEditor – Conceptualization flexibility

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ConceptEditor – Flexible hierarchical views

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ConceptEditor – Automatic user guidance

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Future work

Finalization of• Methodology• PrototypEvaluation• within the STASIS project• other projects

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Thank you for your attention.

Questions?

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