Lightweight Community-Driven Approach to Support Ontology Evolution Essay

Lightweight Community-Driven Approach to Support Ontology Evolution - Essay Example The chapter goes on to identify the advantage of ontology evolution, the lack of systematic approach for ontology evolution and explains the motivation for this study. The chapter ends with the objectives of the study and thesis structure. 1.2 Ontology Definitions The term â€Å"Ontology† is derived from its usage in philosophy where it means the study of being or existence as well as the basic categories (Witmer 2004). Therefore, it is now used to refer to what exists in a system model. Definition 1: According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary (2011), â€Å"It is a particular nature of being or the kinds of things that have existence. Definition 2: Gruber (1993), on the other hand, provides a more concrete definition of Ontology. He defines it as a study which explicitly explains concepts and relationships (Gruber 1993). The set of concepts (e.g. classes, relations, functions) are used to represent and describe domain knowledge. For example, in oil and gas industry there is an established ontology for Statoil in Norway (Association 2008) a standard library related to an oil and gas domain. 1.3 Ontology Editor Ontology Editor is an application which is developed to view and edit ontology. In the past few years many applications have been developed such as OilEd (Bechhofer, Horrocks et al. 2001), OntoEdit (Sure, Erdmann et al. 2002), Protege (Gennari, Musen et al. 2003) and Web-Protege (Tudorache, Vendetti et al. 2008). Further details are explained below about each ontology editor: - OilEd: OilEd was developed in Manchester University. It is a simple ontology editor that provides further guidance in the development of Ontology Interchange Language (OIL)-based ontologies (Bechhofer, Horrocks et al. 2001), which is basically a web-based representation of ontologies organized to make it accessible and usable (Cover, 2000). It is the one which pioneers ontology editing (Bechhofer, Horrocks et al. 2001). - OntoEdit: OntoEdit was developed by the Knowledge Ma nagement Group at University of Karsnuhe Institute AFIB. It provides an ontology development that allows collaboration and inferencing. The method involves three main steps which start with requirements specification, refinement and evaluation. The first step is where the ontology engineers and domain experts meet and work towards identifying the goal of the ontology, description of the domain, and the availability of references. Design guidelines are also established in this step. Then, the team then makes the ontology in the refinement phase. Finally, the ontology requires evaluation according to its requirements specification by identifying possible errors in the ontology and efficiency for enabling collaborative work (Sure, Erdmann et al. 2002). - Protege: Protege was developed by Mark Musen at Stanford University. It is an ontology editor which has come a long way. Protege started in 1987 as a small application, which was aimed at building knowledge acquisition tools. Protege h as then been developed further, providing many new features for each version that has been released. Currently, there are hundreds of individuals and research groups are using Protege (Gennari, Musen et al. 2003). - Web-Protege: Web-Protege is a web version of Protege, also developed in Stanford University. This allows the users who have access to view and edit the ontology from the internet (Tudorache, Vende