{"title":"Ontologies in the era of large language models – a perspective","authors":"Fabian Neuhaus","doi":"10.3233/ao-230072","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3233/ao-230072","url":null,"abstract":"The potential of large language models (LLM) has captured the imagination of the public and researchers alike. In contrast to previous generations of machine learning models, LLMs are general-purpose tools, which can communicate with humans. In particular, they are able to define terms and answer factual questions based on some internally represented knowledge. Thus, LLMs support functionalities that are closely related to ontologies. In this perspective article, I will discuss the consequences of the advent of LLMs for the field of applied ontology.","PeriodicalId":49238,"journal":{"name":"Applied Ontology","volume":" 6","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139142488","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A plea for epistemic ontologies","authors":"Gilles Kassel","doi":"10.3233/ao-230031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3233/ao-230031","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, we advocate the use of “epistemic” ontologies, i.e., systems of categories representing our knowledge of the world, rather than the world directly. We first expose a metaphysical framework based on a dual mental and physical realism, which underpins the development of these epistemic ontologies. To this end, we refer to the theories of intentionality and representation established within the school of Franz Brentano at the turn of the 20th century and choose to rehabilitate the notion of a ‘representation object’, as theorized by Kasimir Twardowski. We therefore propose that the categories of epistemic ontologies correspond to ‘general representation objects’. Secondly, we apply these proposals to the treatment of technical artefacts, material qualities of objects and events (notably as a continuation of our previous work on events). This leads us to sketch out a foundational epistemic ontology.","PeriodicalId":49238,"journal":{"name":"Applied Ontology","volume":"10 9","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138945017","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Jens Dörpinghaus, Johanna Binnewitt, Stefan Winnige, Kristine Hein, Kai Krüger
{"title":"Towards a German labor market ontology: Challenges and applications","authors":"Jens Dörpinghaus, Johanna Binnewitt, Stefan Winnige, Kristine Hein, Kai Krüger","doi":"10.3233/ao-230027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3233/ao-230027","url":null,"abstract":"The labor market is an area with diverse data structures and multiple applications, such as matching job seekers with the right training or job. For this reason, the multilingual classification of European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations (ESCO) is a good example of the central role of ontologies in this area. However, ESCO cannot provide all the details of local labor market needs and does not provide links to other hierarchies of competences. For example, other taxonomies of occupations and skills are widely used in German-speaking countries, but they are not in a state where they are easily accessible for interoperability and reasoning. In this paper, we present a first version of a German Labor Market Ontology (GLMO) that uses ESCO as a top-level ontology for the target domain. This makes it highly interoperable and comparable to existing ontologies by providing details for the regional structures in German-speaking countries. In addition, we present a detailed evaluation of the provided data and applications, as well as an extensive discussion of future work.","PeriodicalId":49238,"journal":{"name":"Applied Ontology","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139229967","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
S. Clint Dowland, Barry Smith, Matthew A. Diller, Jobst Landgrebe, William R. Hogan
{"title":"Ontology of language, with applications to demographic data","authors":"S. Clint Dowland, Barry Smith, Matthew A. Diller, Jobst Landgrebe, William R. Hogan","doi":"10.3233/ao-230049","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3233/ao-230049","url":null,"abstract":"Here we present what we believe is a novel account of what languages are, along with an axiomatically rich representation of languages and language-related data that is based on this account. We propose an account of languages as aggregates of dispositions distributed across aggregates of persons, and in doing so we address linguistic competences and the processes that realize them. This paves the way for representing additional types of language-related entities. Like demographic data of other sorts, data about languages may be of use to researchers in a number of areas, including biomedical research. Data on the languages used in clinical encounters are typically included in medical records, and capture an important factor in patient-provider interactions. Like many types of patient and demographic data, data on a person’s preferred and primary languages are organized in different ways by different systems. This can be a barrier to data integration. We believe that a robust framework for representing language in general and preferred and primary language in particular – which has been lacking in ontologies thus far – can promote more successful integration of language-related data from disparate data sources.","PeriodicalId":49238,"journal":{"name":"Applied Ontology","volume":"30 12","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135869231","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Stefan Schulz, James T. Case, Peter Hendler, Daniel Karlsson, Michael Lawley, Ronald Cornet, Robert Hausam, Harold Solbrig, Karim Nashar, Catalina Martínez-Costa, Yongsheng Gao
{"title":"SNOMED CT and Basic Formal Ontology – convergence or contradiction between standards? The case of “clinical finding”","authors":"Stefan Schulz, James T. Case, Peter Hendler, Daniel Karlsson, Michael Lawley, Ronald Cornet, Robert Hausam, Harold Solbrig, Karim Nashar, Catalina Martínez-Costa, Yongsheng Gao","doi":"10.3233/ao-230018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3233/ao-230018","url":null,"abstract":"Background: SNOMED CT is a large terminology system designed to represent all aspects of healthcare. Its current form and content result from decades of bottom-up evolution. Due to SNOMED CT’s formal descriptions, it can be considered an ontology. The Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) is a foundational ontology that proposes a small set of disjoint, hierarchically ordered classes, supported by relations and axioms. In contrast, as a typical top-down endeavor, BFO was designed as a foundational framework for domain ontologies in the natural sciences and related disciplines. Whereas it is mostly assumed that domain ontologies should be created as extensions of foundational ontologies, a post-hoc harmonization of consolidated domain ontologies in use, such as SNOMED CT, is known to be challenging. Methods: We explored the feasibility of harmonizing SNOMED CT with BFO, with a focus on the SNOMED CT Clinical Finding hierarchy. With more than 100,000 classes, it accounts for about one third of SNOMED CT’s content. In particular, we represented typical SNOMED CT finding/disorder concepts using description logics under BFO. Three representational patterns were created and the logical entailments analyzed. Results: Under a first scrutiny, the clinical intuition that diseases, disorders, signs and symptoms form a homogeneous ontological upper-level class appeared incompatible with BFO’s upper-level distinction into continuants and occurrents. The Clinical finding class seemed to be an umbrella for all kinds of entities of clinical interest, such as material entities, processes, states, dispositions, and qualities. This suggests the conclusion that Clinical finding would not be a suitable upper-level class from an BFO perspective. On closer inspection of the taxonomic links within this hierarchy and the implicit meaning derived thereof, it became clear that Clinical finding classes do not characterize the entity (e.g. a fracture, allergy, tumor, pain, hemorrhage, seizure, fever) in a literal sense but rather the condition of a patient having that fracture, allergy, pain etc. This gives sense to the current characteristic of the Clinical Finding hierarchy, in which complex classes are modeled as subclasses of their constituents. Most of these taxonomic links are inferred, as the consequence of the ‘role group’ design pattern, which is ubiquitous in SNOMED CT and has often been subject of controversy regarding its semantics. Conclusion: Our analyses resulted in the proposal of (i) equating SNOMED CT’s ‘role group’ property with the reflexive and transitive BFO relation ‘has occurrent part’; and (ii) reinterpreting Clinical Findings as Clinical Occurrents, i.e. temporally extended entities in an organism, having one or more occurrents as temporal parts that occur in continuants. This re-interpretation was corroborated by a manual analysis of classes under Clinical Finding, as well as the identification of similar modeling patterns in other ontologies. As a result, S","PeriodicalId":49238,"journal":{"name":"Applied Ontology","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43596070","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From Smart City to Smart Society: A quality-of-life ontological model for problem detection from user-generated content","authors":"Carlos Periñán-Pascual","doi":"10.3233/ao-230281","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3233/ao-230281","url":null,"abstract":"Social-media platforms have become a global phenomenon of communication, where users publish content in text, images, video, audio or a combination of them to convey opinions, report facts that are happening or show current situations of interest. Smart-city applications can benefit from social media and digital participatory platforms when citizens become active social sensors of the problems that occur in their communities. Indeed, systems that analyse and interpret user-generated content can extract actionable information from the digital world to improve citizens’ quality of life. This article aims to model the knowledge required for automatic problem detection to reproduce citizens’ awareness of problems from the analysis of text-based user-generated content items. Therefore, this research focuses on two primary goals. On the one hand, we present the underpinnings of the ontological model that categorises the types of problems affecting citizens’ quality of life in society. In this regard, this study contributes significantly to developing an ontology based on the social-sensing paradigm to support the advance of smart societies. On the other hand, we describe the architecture of the text-processing module that relies on such an ontology to perform problem detection, which involves the tasks of topic categorisation and keyword recognition.","PeriodicalId":49238,"journal":{"name":"Applied Ontology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48414714","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
P. D. Nostro, G. Goldbeck, Andrea Pozzi, Daniele Toti
{"title":"Modeling experts, knowledge providers and expertise in Materials Modeling: MAEO as an application ontology of EMMO's ecosystem","authors":"P. D. Nostro, G. Goldbeck, Andrea Pozzi, Daniele Toti","doi":"10.3233/ao-230024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3233/ao-230024","url":null,"abstract":"This work presents the MarketPlace Agent and Expert Ontology (MAEO), an ontology for modeling experts, expertise, and more broadly, knowledge providers and knowledge seekers for the subject areas of Materials Modeling. MAEO had its inception within the “MarketPlace” European project, whose purpose is to bring about a single entry point for gathering scientific and industrial stakeholders in Materials Modeling. As such, this project aimed to build an online platform where experts and knowledge providers can be searched, found and brought into contact with users, or knowledge seekers, and with one another. MAEO was developed in order to fulfill the requirements of this online platform and thus support it, but is also part of a wider ecosystem of Materials Modeling-related ontologies, at whose core lies the Elementary Multiperspective Material Ontology (EMMO). MAEO is thus an EMMO-compliant application ontology, and has been loosely aligned with a number of existing ontologies, including Friend-Of-A-Friend (FOAF) and five recently-developed EMMO-based domain ontologies for the classification of materials, models, manufacturing processes, characterization methods and software products related to Materials Modeling. Here, a detailed description of the axiomatization of MAEO and its interconnected ontologies is provided, along with results coming from its deployment and experimentation in a StarDog triplestore. Availability. The axiomatization of the ontology is stored in a GitHub repository available at: https://github.com/emmo-repo/MAEO-Ontology, and is published at the following URL: http://emmo.info/emmo/application/maeo/experts.","PeriodicalId":49238,"journal":{"name":"Applied Ontology","volume":"18 1","pages":"99-118"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69755895","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Caitlin Woods, Tim French, M. Hodkiewicz, Tyler Bikaun
{"title":"An ontology for maintenance procedure documentation","authors":"Caitlin Woods, Tim French, M. Hodkiewicz, Tyler Bikaun","doi":"10.3233/ao-230279","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3233/ao-230279","url":null,"abstract":"In mining, manufacturing and industrial process industries, maintenance procedures are used as an aid to guide technicians through complex manual tasks. These procedures are not machine-readable, and cannot support reasoning in digitally integrated manufacturing systems. Procedure documents contain unstructured text and are stored in a variety of formats. The aim of this work is to query information held in real industrial maintenance procedures. To achieve this, we develop an ontology for maintenance procedures using the OWL 2 description language. We leverage classes and object properties from the ISO 15926 Part 14 Upper Ontology and create a domain ontology. The key contribution of this paper is a demonstration of trade-offs required when modelling an existing engineering artifact, where an abstraction of its contents is given a-priori. We provide an ontologically rigorous abstraction of notions captured in procedure documentation to a set of classes, relations and axioms that allow reasoning over the contents. Validation of the ontology is performed via a series of competency questions based on queries relevant to technicians, engineers and schedulers in industry. The ontology is applied to real world maintenance procedures from two industrial organisations.","PeriodicalId":49238,"journal":{"name":"Applied Ontology","volume":"18 1","pages":"169-206"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69756025","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Information, mereology and vagueness","authors":"Thomas Bittner","doi":"10.3233/ao-230277","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3233/ao-230277","url":null,"abstract":"Classical systems of mereology identify a maximuml set of jointly exhaustive and pairwise disjoint (RCC5) relations. The amount of information that is carried by each member of this set of (crisp) relations is determined by the number of bits of information that are required to distinguish all the members of the set. It is postulated in this paper, that vague mereological relations are limited in the amount of information they can carry. That is, if a crisp mereological relation can carry N bits of information, then a vague mereological relation can carry only 1 ⩽ n < N bits. The aim of this paper is it to explore these ideas in the context of various systems of vague mereological relations. The resulting formalism is non-classical in the sense of quantum information theory.","PeriodicalId":49238,"journal":{"name":"Applied Ontology","volume":"18 1","pages":"119-167"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69755957","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Applied OntologyPub Date : 2022-01-01Epub Date: 2022-05-04DOI: 10.3233/ao-210260
Elizabeth E Umberfield, Cooper Stansbury, Kathleen Ford, Yun Jiang, Sharon L R Kardia, Andrea K Thomer, Marcelline R Harris
{"title":"Evaluating and Extending the Informed Consent Ontology for Representing Permissions from the Clinical Domain.","authors":"Elizabeth E Umberfield, Cooper Stansbury, Kathleen Ford, Yun Jiang, Sharon L R Kardia, Andrea K Thomer, Marcelline R Harris","doi":"10.3233/ao-210260","DOIUrl":"10.3233/ao-210260","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The purpose of this study was to evaluate, revise, and extend the Informed Consent Ontology (ICO) for expressing clinical permissions, including reuse of residual clinical biospecimens and health data. This study followed a formative evaluation design and used a bottom-up modeling approach. Data were collected from the literature on US federal regulations and a study of clinical consent forms. Eleven federal regulations and fifteen permission-sentences from clinical consent forms were iteratively modeled to identify entities and their relationships, followed by community reflection and negotiation based on a series of predetermined evaluation questions. ICO included fifty-two classes and twelve object properties necessary when modeling, demonstrating appropriateness of extending ICO for the clinical domain. Twenty-six additional classes were imported into ICO from other ontologies, and twelve new classes were recommended for development. This work addresses a critical gap in formally representing permissions clinical permissions, including reuse of residual clinical biospecimens and health data. It makes missing content available to the OBO Foundry, enabling use alongside other widely-adopted biomedical ontologies. ICO serves as a machine-interpretable and interoperable tool for responsible reuse of residual clinical biospecimens and health data at scale.</p>","PeriodicalId":49238,"journal":{"name":"Applied Ontology","volume":"17 2","pages":"321-336"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9616177/pdf/nihms-1841397.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"40458092","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}