This document provides an overview of stepwise methodologies for ontology engineering. It discusses phases such as identifying the purpose and scope, building the ontology through capturing concepts and defining relationships, integrating existing ontologies, evaluating the ontology, and documenting it. The methodology proposes that building the ontology involves capturing concepts through brainstorming, organizing concepts, producing clear definitions, and defining taxonomies and properties. It emphasizes reaching consensus among those involved and reusing existing ontologies where possible. The goal is to develop ontologies that are clear, coherent, extensible, and reusable.

1. ‫أكاديمية الحكومة اإللكترونية الفلسطينية‬
The Palestinian eGovernment Academy
www.egovacademy.ps
Tutorial 4: Ontology Engineering & Lexical Semantics
Session 8.2
Stepwise Methodologies
Dr. Mustafa Jarrar
University of Birzeit
mjarrar@birzeit.edu
www.jarrar.info
PalGov © 2011 1

2. About
This tutorial is part of the PalGov project, funded by the TEMPUS IV program of the
Commission of the European Communities, grant agreement 511159-TEMPUS-1-
2010-1-PS-TEMPUS-JPHES. The project website: www.egovacademy.ps
Project Consortium:
Birzeit University, Palestine
University of Trento, Italy
(Coordinator )
Palestine Polytechnic University, Palestine Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
Palestine Technical University, Palestine
Université de Savoie, France
Ministry of Telecom and IT, Palestine
University of Namur, Belgium
Ministry of Interior, Palestine
TrueTrust, UK
Ministry of Local Government, Palestine
Coordinator:
Dr. Mustafa Jarrar
Birzeit University, P.O.Box 14- Birzeit, Palestine
Telfax:+972 2 2982935 mjarrar@birzeit.eduPalGov © 2011
2

3. © Copyright Notes
Everyone is encouraged to use this material, or part of it, but should
properly cite the project (logo and website), and the author of that part.
No part of this tutorial may be reproduced or modified in any form or by
any means, without prior written permission from the project, who have
the full copyrights on the material.
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
CC-BY-NC-SA
This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-
commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations
under the identical terms.
PalGov © 2011 3

4. Tutorial Map
Topic Time
Session 1_1: The Need for Sharing Semantics 1.5
Session 1_2: What is an ontology 1.5
Intended Learning Objectives
A: Knowledge and Understanding Session 2: Lab- Build a Population Ontology 3
4a1: Demonstrate knowledge of what is an ontology, Session 3: Lab- Build a BankCustomer Ontology 3
how it is built, and what it is used for.
Session 4: Lab- Build a BankCustomer Ontology 3
4a2: Demonstrate knowledge of ontology engineering
and evaluation. Session 5: Lab- Ontology Tools 3
4a3: Describe the difference between an ontology and a Session 6_1: Ontology Engineering Challenges 1.5
schema, and an ontology and a dictionary.
Session 6_2: Ontology Double Articulation 1.5
4a4: Explain the concept of language ontologies, lexical
semantics and multilingualism. Session 7: Lab - Build a Legal-Person Ontology 3
B: Intellectual Skills Session 8_1: Ontology Modeling Challenges 1.5
4b1: Develop quality ontologies.
Session 8_2: Stepwise Methodologies 1.5
4b2: Tackle ontology engineering challenges.
4b3: Develop multilingual ontologies. Session 9: Lab - Build a Legal-Person Ontology 3
4b4: Formulate quality glosses. Session 10: Zinnar – The Palestinian eGovernment 3
C: Professional and Practical Skills Interoperability Framework
4c1: Use ontology tools. Session 11: Lab- Using Zinnar in web services 3
4c2: (Re)use existing Language ontologies.
Session 12_1: Lexical Semantics and Multilingually 1.5
D: General and Transferable Skills
d1: Working with team. Session 12_2: WordNets 1.5
d2: Presenting and defending ideas. Session 13: ArabicOntology 3
d3: Use of creativity and innovation in problem solving.
Session 14: Lab-Using Linguistic Ontologies 3
d4: Develop communication skills and logical reasoning
abilities. Session 15: Lab-Using Linguistic Ontologies 3
PalGov © 2011 4

5. Outline and Session ILOs
This session will help student to:
4a1: Demonstrate knowledge of what is an ontology, how it is
built, and what it is used for.
4b1: Develop quality ontologies.
PalGov © 2011 5

6. Methodology
What are the phases of the ontology development life
cycle? taking into account that Ontologies might be built
collaboratively by many people.
Let’s discuss from where to start, if you want to build an
ontology for:
• E-government
• E-Banking
• E-Health
• Bioinformatics
• Multilingual search engine
• …
PalGov © 2011 6

7. Methodological Questions
– Which tools and techniques to use?
– Which languages should be used in which circumstances, and in
which order?
– What quality measures should we care about?
– What things can be reused?
– Which people should be assigned which tasks?
– ....
• Many Methodologies exist ! But non is good! Because each
project/application/domain is different, and the background of the
people involved are also different, etc.
• We will overview some common steps in this lecture, thus try to learn
smartly, and don’t follow these steps literally. You should have your
own methodology for each ontology.
PalGov © 2011 7

8. Most methodologies propose these phases:
1- Identify Purpose and Scope
2- Building the Ontology
2.1- Ontology Capture
2.2- Ontology Coding
3- Integrating existing ontologies
4- Evaluation
5- Documentation
PalGov © 2011 8

9. 1- Purpose and Scope
• There is no one/ideal ontology of a certain domain
– There are always alternatives, each abstracting different things, and for
different usages.
• What should be included in the ontology (concepts and relations)
should be smartly determined, taking into account (if possible) many
application scenarios.
– Interoperability between systems.
– improve search quality.
– Communication between people and organizations (important).
…
– Future extensions should be anticipated.
PalGov © 2011 9

10. 1- Purpose and Scope
• When you specify the purpose and scope, you should specify the
following:
1- What is the domain that the ontology will cover?
The notion of context, in the double articulation theory, is part of the
Purpose and Scope.
That is: the scope where the vocabulary interpretation should be valid.
For example: the scope of the legal-Person ontology is the set of all
laws, regulations, and repositories in the state.
2- What we are going to use the ontology for?
 Enough description about what application scenarios are taking into
account.
Be carful with the ontology usability/reusability trade-off
PalGov © 2011 10

11. 2- Building the Ontology
2.1- Ontology Capture
– Identify key concepts and relationships.
– Produce clear text definitions for these concepts (i.e., glosses).
– Identify terms that refer to these concepts.
– Reach Consensus (Consensus is an indication of correctness).
 You may apply the 7 steps for building an ORM schema,
somehow!
2.2- Ontology Coding/Specification/Characterization
– Explicit representation of the “conceptualization” in some formal
language.
PalGov © 2011 11

12. 2.1- Ontology Capture: Scoping
• Brainstorming
– Produce all potentially relevant terms and phrases.
• Nouns form the basis for concept names
• Verbs (or verb phrases) form the basis for property and names.
This step can be semi- automated somehow, as candidate concepts and
relations can be extracted automatically from relevant documents, laws,
forms, DB schemes....
• Organize candidate concepts into groups
Group related terms together.
– Exclude some terms if not relevant (w.r.t., purpose and scope)
– Keep notes of these decisions.
– Group similar terms and potential synonyms together.
PalGov © 2011 12

13. 2.1- Ontology Capture: Produce Definitions
• Use suitable meta-ontology
– i.e., use modeling primitives in a consistent manner (e.g. Type,
role, entity, instance, relationship...)
• When several people are involved, each might be responsible on a
group of terms
– Semantic overlap with others must be right in the first place,
otherwise lot of redundant re-working.
• Terms: Produce definitions/glosses in a middle-out fashion
– Define a gloss for each term. This helps get deeper understanding
of the domain.
– These glosses will have to be revised later, after defining the
relationships/ subsumptions between concepts.
– This is called middle-out, rather than top-down or bottom up. – will
be discussed later.
PalGov © 2011 13

14. Define Taxonomy
• Relevant terms must be organized in a taxonomic hierarchy (i.e.,
subsumptions)
– Opinions differ on whether it is more efficient to do this in a top-
down or a bottom-up fashion.
• Ensure that hierarchy is indeed a taxonomy:
– If A subsumes B, then every instance of A must also be a
subsume B (compatible with semantics of rdfs:subClassOf)
– Insuring the correctness of subsumptions needs philosophical
thinking (apply the OntoClean Methodology).
• The semantics of subsumption demands that whenever A subsumes
B, every property that holds for instances of B must also apply to
instances of A (called inheritance).
– It makes sense to attach properties to the highest class in the
hierarchy to which they apply.
PalGov © 2011 14

15. Define Properties
• Determine the relevant properties for each concept. Such
properties must be essential –to describe the meaning-, or
relevant to the applications.
• While attaching properties to concepts, it is useful to
determine its range (its datatype/value, or relations with
other concepts).
PalGov © 2011 15

16. Add Rules and Restrictions
• Cardinality Restrictions
• Which properties should be unique, mandatory,
disjunctions, restricted values…etc.
• Relational Characteristics
– symmetry, transitivity, inverse properties, functional values
 You must avoid the situation that the added rules are DB integrity
constraints.
 Some/all rules should be verbalized –in pseudo natural language
sentences- so to enable other people review it and give feedback.
PalGov © 2011 16

17. Define Some Important Instances
• Some important instances (might) be added to the
ontology, if needed. Such entities can be:
– Country: Palestine
– Person: Arafat
– Capital: Jerusalem
•  in case of a large instances, it is more convenient to
have them separately .
- See the Entity and Address servers in Zinnar
PalGov © 2011 17

18. Advantages of the Middle-out Approaches
• A bottom-up approach results in a high degree of detail
– increases overall effort
– makes it difficult to spot commonality between related concepts.
– increases risk of inconsistencies and re-work.
• Top-down allow better control of degree of detail
– risk of arbitrary high-level categories
– risk of limited stability
• Middle-out strikes is a compromise, but it allow the ontology
evolve gradually, you need to come back to some steps.
• The higher level concepts naturally arise and are thus more
likely to be stable.
PalGov © 2011 18

19. Reaching Agreement: Some suggestions
 Ontologies are made to be agreed and shared, thus it is VERY
important to make sure that people agree on them.
 How to facilitate reaching agreement?
• Produce a natural language text definitions.
- Ask domain experts to review the context, glosses, verbalized rules,
and the ontology itself in a graphical/diagramatic form.
• Ensure consistency with terms already in use
– use existing thesauri and dictionaries
– avoid introducing new terms in the definitions
• Indicate relationships with other commonly used terms
– synonyms, variants, such referring to different dimensions
• Give examples PalGov © 2011 19

20. Integrating Existing Ontologies
• Check overlap with existing ontologies
• Establish formal links
– Produce mappings to existing concept definitions
– Import and extend existing ontologies
• Avoid re-inventing the wheel!
PalGov © 2011 20

21. Ontology Evaluation
Several Type of evaluations:
1. Usability Evaluation: Validate whether the ontology produced
satisfies (at least) the intended applications’ requirements.
2. Syntax evaluation: Validate whether the ontology is well-formed
w.r.t the used language.
3. Logical evaluation: Validate whether the ontology has axioms
contradicting or implying each other.
4. Ontological Evaluation: Validate whether the ontology has
concepts that should be instances, sub-concepts that should be
roles, etc. (The OntoClean methodology is very good for this
evaluation)
PalGov © 2011 21

22. Check for Implications and Contradictions
Some tools exist to automatically detect logical correctness (contradictions
and implications), depending on the used ontology language (Such as ORM:
DogmaModeler, OWL: Racer)
PalGov © 2011 22

23. Some Guidelines
Clarity: The ontology engineer should communicate effectively with
the domain experts (= ask the right questions):
– Natural language definitions.
– Give examples, alternatives, and contradictions, elicit knowledge.
– emphasize distinctions.
Coherence: The ontology should be internally consistent
– Syntactically correct.
– Logically consistent.
– Ontologically consistent.
Extensibility: modularize the ontology in a way it is easy to build, understand,
and maintain. What should be in a module?
Reusability and Usability: be innovative to tradeoff this smartly.
PalGov © 2011 23

24. References
Mike Uschol: Building Ontologies: Towards a Unified Methodology.
Proceedings of Expert Systems th Annual Conference
of the British Computer Society Specialist Group on Expert Systems. 1996
http://www.imamu.edu.sa/Scientific_selections/Documents/IT/96-es96-unified-
method.pdf
Mustafa Jarrar: Towards methodological principles for ontology
engineering. PhD Thesis. Vrije Universiteit Brussel. (May 2005)
http://www.jarrar.info/phd-thesis/
Fernández López: Overview Of Methodologies For Building Ontologies.
Proceedings of the IJCAI99 Workshop on Ontologies and
ProblemSolvingMethods Lessons Learned and Future Trends CEUR
Publications.
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.39.6002
PalGov © 2011 24