Modular Ontologies Composition

This article describes how a modular ontology is a set of interconnected ontology modules. Modularity is a key requirement for collaborative ontology engineering and for distributed ontology reuse on the Web. Combining ontology modules in this context to get a global ontology is an important issue since it requires to resolves mismatches between the compared concepts. This article proposes a novel approach to automatically compose ontology modules. The proposed approach is based on concept structure comparison. The algorithm allowing to merge the ontology modules into a global ontology is detailed and similarity measures are explained. Similarity measures are computed against concept names, attributes and relationships. Experiments performed to test this algorithm are described and evaluation results are equally discussed.

Orchestrating a Network of Mereotopological Theories: An Abridged Report

Parthood is used widely in ontologies across subject domains, specified in a multitude of mereological theories, and even more when combined with topology. To complicate the landscape, decidable languages put restrictions on the language features, so that only fragments of the mereo(topo)logical theories can be represented, even though those full features may be needed to check correctness during modelling. We address these issues by specifying a structured network of theories formulated in multiple logics that are glued together by the various linking constructs of the Distributed Ontology Language, DOL. For the KGEMT mereotopology and its five sub-theories, together with the DL-based OWL species and first- and second-order logic, this network in DOL orchestrates 28 ontologies.

TurtleEditor: A Web-Based RDF Editor to Support Distributed Ontology Development on Repository Hosting Platforms

Ontologies are increasingly being developed on web-based repository hosting platforms such as GitHub. Accordingly, there is a demand for ontology editors which can be easily connected to the hosted repositories. TurtleEditor is a web-based RDF editor that provides this capability and supports the distributed development of ontologies on repository hosting platforms. It offers features such as syntax checking, syntax highlighting, and auto completion, along with a SPARQL endpoint to query the ontology. Furthermore, TurtleEditor integrates a visual editing view that allows for the graphical manipulation of the RDF graph and includes some basic clustering functionality. The text and graph views are constantly synchronized so that all changes to the ontology are immediately propagated and the views are updated accordingly. The results of a user study and performance tests show that TurtleEditor can indeed be effectively used to support the distributed development of ontologies on repository hosting platforms.