Toward a systematic conflict resolution framework for ontologies

Abstract

Background The ontology authoring step in ontology development involves having to make choices about what subject domain knowledge to include. This may concern sorting out ontological differences and making choices between conflicting axioms due to limitations in the logic or the subject domain semantics. Examples are dealing with different foundational ontologies in ontology alignment and OWL 2 DL’s transitive object property versus a qualified cardinality constraint. Such conflicts have to be resolved somehow. However, only isolated and fragmented guidance for doing so is available, which therefore results in ad hoc decision-making that may not be the best choice or forgotten about later. Results This work aims to address this by taking steps towards a framework to deal with the various types of modeling conflicts through meaning negotiation and conflict resolution in a systematic way. It proposes an initial library of common conflicts, a conflict set, typical steps toward resolution, and the software availability and requirements needed for it. The approach was evaluated with an actual case of domain knowledge usage in the context of epizootic disease outbreak, being avian influenza, and running examples with COVID-19 ontologies. Conclusions The evaluation demonstrated the potential and feasibility of a conflict resolution framework for ontologies.

Knowledge Representation and Management: Notable Contributions in 2021

“…The section editors' initial screening based on the title and abstract resulted in 326 papers. This set of papers was further reviewed jointly by the section editors to select a consensus list of 15 candidate best papers [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20]. The four top-ranked papers according to expert reviewers' evaluation were selected as the best papers in the field of KRM published in 2021 (see Table 1).…”

“…In the second article, Keet and Grütter [7] proposed a framework to systematically handle modelling conflicts via meaning negotiation and conflict resolution in the ontology development and (re)use processes. They introduced a preliminary library of conflicts that may emerge during ontology authoring, and the conflict set data structure that stores the minimum necessary data about such conflicts.…”

“…Among the 15 candidate best papers, eight of them are with regard to development of ontologies. While the best paper from Keet and Grütter [7] focused on studying methodologies to resolve modelling conflicts when reusing multiple ontologies, the other seven candidate papers contributed to the construction of domain-specific ontologies or terminologies, including Alzheimer's disease (AD), infectious diseases, stroke, cervical cancer, computer network assets in healthcare settings, bioethics, and lifestyle diseases.…”

Towards a Software Development Process Based on Ontologies

“…Web Ontology Language (OWL) is one of the most prominent languages to represent ontologies. Since OWL is based on description logics, therefore it is a suitable option to represent and analyze knowledge of different domains [1][2][3][4][5][6][7]. The semantic representation of information by means of ontologies enables checking the consistency of the information as well as automatic reasoning to infer new knowledge.…”

Exploiting an Ontological Model to Study COVID-19 Contagion Chains in Sustainable Smart Cities

“…Seeking approaches to deal with the aforementioned problem, we found that the adoption of ontologies is a suitable option to represent and analyze knowledge of different domains [1][2][3][4][5][6][7]. The semantic representation of information by means of ontologies enables the consistency of the information to be checked, as well as automatic reasoning to infer new knowledge.…”