Starting point of our ontology maturing process model were the shortcomings of the usual separation of creation and usage processes. This led us to rethink ontology engineering as a collaborative and work-integrated activity. In this view, users themselves (within, e.g., communities of practice) can modify the underlying ontology of a semantic application, e.g., add new ontology elements or modify existing ones. This new perspective, motivated by constructivist views on learning, views the quality of an ontology within the context of a semantic application as a balance of three different aspects:
- Appropriateness. An ontology needs to be an appropriate representation of the domain with respect to the purpose of the ontologies required for a semantic application so that it is actually useful. This is only possible when we have a tight coupling and immediate mutual feedback between changes to the ontology and use
of its elements, e.g., for search or annotations. That means, we need a quick, simple and work-integrated way to adapt and modify the ontologies.
- Social Agreement. An ontology needs to represent a shared understanding among all stakeholders. Thus, successful ontology construction is a social and collaborative learning process within the communities of its users. The involved individuals deepen by and by their understanding of the real world and of an (appropriate) vocabulary to describe it.
- Formality. The formalization of ontologies is not possible completely from scratch. In particular for emerging ideas and concepts, it is not possible to directly integrate them into an ontology as they are not clearly defined, yet. That means, the development of an ontology underlies a process of continuous evolution where different levels of formality might co-exist within one ontology. The outcome is an adequate level of formality in the ontology, avoiding both overformalization and the inability to apply semantic algorithms.
To operationalize this view, we have developed the ontology maturing process model that structures the ontology engineering process into four phases:
- Emergence of ideas. New ideas emerge and are introduced by individuals as new concept ideas or informal tags. These are ad-hoc and not well-defined, rather descriptive, e.g. with a text label. They are individually used and informally communicated.
- Consolidation in Communities. Through the collaborative (re-)usage of the concept symbols (tags) within the community, a common vocabulary (or folksonomy) develops. The concept ideas are refined, useless or incorrect ones are rejected. The emerging vocabulary, which is shared among the community members, is still without formal semantics.
- Formalization. Within the third phase, the community begins to organize the concepts into relations. These can be taxonomical (hierarchical) ones as well as arbitrary ad-hoc relations, e.g., in the course of becoming aware of different abstraction levels. This results in lightweight ontologies that rely primarily on inferencing based on subconcept relations.
- Axiomatization. In the last phase the adding of axioms allows and improves for inferencing processes, e.g. in query answering systems. This step requires a high level of competence in logical formalism so that this phase is usually done with the aid of knowledge engineers.
It is important to note that ontology maturing does not assume that ontologies are built from scratch, but can be equally applied to already existent core ontologies used for community seeding. Likewise, this model must not be misunderstood as a strictly linear process; rather real ontology development processes will consist of various iterations between the four different phases.
Tools
SOBOLEO
SOBOLEO (Social Bookmarking and Lightweight Engineering of Ontologies) aims at supporting people working in a certain domain in the collaborative development of a shared index of relevant web resources (bookmarks) and of a shared ontology that is used to organize the bookmarks. That means, collected bookmarks can be annotated with concepts from the ontology and the ontology can be changed at the same time.
SOBOLEO consists of four major parts: (1) a collaborative real time editor for changing the ontology, (2) a tool for the annotation of web resources, (3) a semantic search engine for the annotated web resources, and (4) an ontology browser for navigating the ontology and the index of the web resources. The users within one community create and maintain one ontology and one shared index of web resources collaboratively.
Try SOBOLEO! (Use username www2007 and password www2007).
ImageNotion
ImageNotion is a web-based tool supporting ontology maturing in the domain of images. An imagenotion (formed from the words image and notion) graphically represents a semantic notion through an image. Each imagenotion may contain additional descriptive information like a label and its synonyms (both possible in different languages), temporal information and links to web pages that contain background information for an imagenotion. Using imagenotions, users do not need to distinguish between concepts and instances in ontologies – a separation of ontology elements often considered artificial. In addition to descriptive information, relations between imagenotion are also possible. The aim of the ImageNotion methodology is to guide the process of visually creating an ontology. This ontology will contain imagenotions as semantic elements and relations between them.
Try ImageNotion!
People
The Ontology Maturing theory and the tools were developed at FZI Research Center for Information Technologies by Simone Braun, Andreas Schmidt, Andreas Walter and Valentin Zacharias within the projects Im Wissensnetz and IMAGINATION.
Bibliography
2010
Simone Braun, Christine Kunzmann, Andreas Schmidt
People Tagging & Ontology Maturing: Towards Collaborative Competence Management
In: David Randall and Pascal Salembier (eds.): From CSCW to Web2.0: European Developments in Collaborative Design Selected Papers from COOP08, Computer Supported Cooperative Work vol. , Springer, 2010
Abstract Competence Management approaches suggest promising instruments for more effective resource allocation, knowledge management, learning support, and human resource development in general. However, especially on the level of individual employees, such approaches have so far not been able to show sustain-able success on a larger scale. Piloting applications like expert finders have often failed in the long run because of incomplete and outdated data, apart from social and organizational barriers. To overcome these problems, we propose a collabora-tive competence management approach. In this approach, we combine Web 2.0-style bottom-up processes with organizational top-down processes. We addressed this problem as a collaborative ontology construction problem of which the con-ceptual foundation is the Ontology Maturing Process Model. In order to realize the Ontology Maturing Process Model for competence management, we have built the AJAX-based semantic social bookmarking application SOBOLEO that offers task-embedded competence ontology development and an easy-to-use interface. Following evolutionary prototyping within the design-based research methodology we conducted two field experiments in parallel with the system development in order to test the approach of people tagging in general and to explore motivational and social aspects in particular.
2009
Simone Braun, Andreas Schmidt, Valentin Zacharias
Mit Social Semantic Bookmarking zur nützlichen Ontologie
i-com - Zeitschrift für interaktive und kooperative Medien,2009
Abstract Dieser Artikel präsentiert das SOBOLEO-System und das zugrundeliegende Ontologiereifungsprozessmodell für die kollaborative Ontologieentwicklung. Man kann beobachten, dass die meisten aktuellen Ontologieentwicklungsprozesse und -werkzeuge von einer organisatorischen, personellen, technischen und zeitlichen Trennung zwischen Entwicklung und Nutzung der Ontologie ausgehen – eine Trennung, die wiederum häufig zu kostspieligen und nicht an ihre Nutzung angepasste Ontologien führt. Unser Ansatz überwindet durch diese Trennung verursachten Schwierigkeiten mittels Methoden und Werkzeuge, die die Nutzer der Ontologie in die Lage versetzen, diese selbst zu entwickeln, und zwar im gleichen System, das die Ontologie nutzt und zu dem Zeitpunkt und Umfang wie jeweils nötig (arbeitsintegriert).
Heiko Paoli, Andreas Schmidt, Peter C. Lockemann
User-Driven SemanticWiki-based Business Service Description
In: Sebastian Schaffert and Klaus Tochtermann and Tassilo Pelegrini (eds.): Networked Knowledge - Networked Media: Integrating Knowledge Management, New Media Technologies and Semantic Systems, Springer, 2009, pp. 269-284
Abstract A key factor for success of companies operating in a globalized market environment is a modern SOA-based infrastructure. An essential component of a SOA infrastructure is the central service registry. Current standards for organizing service registries and their implementations are driven by the technical aspects of the infrastructure. When using such technically organized service registries, business users often fail to find the needed information. With the concepts of Web 2.0 in mind, we present a new approach to the organization and implementation of the business registries that are driven by the needs of business users. The paper discusses the problems of the current technically driven approaches, presents an architecture for a business user-driven service registry and introduces an implementation of the architecture using UDDI and Semantic MediaWiki.
Valentin Zacharias, Simone Braun, Andreas Schmidt
Social Semantic Bookmarking with SOBOLEO
In: San Murugesan (eds.): Handbook of Research on Web 2.0, 3.0 and X.0: Technologies, Business, and Social Applications, IGI Global, 2009, pp. 225-241
Simone Braun, Andreas Schmidt
Mit “People Tagging” zum Kollaborativen Kompetenzmanagement
In: Isabella Peters and Cornelius Puschmann and Violeta Trkulja and Katrin Weller (eds.): SoSoft 09 - Social Software @ Work. Collaborative Work, Communication and Knowledge Management in Theory and Practice. Proceedings of the 1st Interdisciplinary Workshop of the Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf, Germany, September 28th and 29th, 2009, CEUR Workshop Proceedings vol. 591, 2009, pp. 65-71
Abstract Das Wissen darüber, wer was weiß, ist im Unternehmen ein essentielles Element für effiziente Wissensreifungsprozesse, wie etwa das Finden des richtigen Ansprechpartners. Viele Ansätze, die dies adressieren, konnten ihren Versprechungen jedoch nicht gerecht werden. Häufig weil in den Verzeichnissen enthaltene Informationen schnell veraltet oder nicht in einer für die Nutzer relevanten Weise beschrieben waren. Zur Überwindung dieser Probleme präsentieren wir einen Ansatz zum kollaborativen Kompetenzmanagement, der alle Mitarbeiter einbindet und teilnehmen lässt. Die Basis hierfür bildet das sog. "People Tagging", bei dem jeder Mitarbeiter die Expertise und Interessen seiner Kollegen mit Tags beschreiben kann. Dies wird durch Methoden der Community-gestützten Ontologieentwicklung ergänzt, mit denen Mitarbeiter den zum Tagging verwendeten Kompetenzkatalog ständig weiterentwickeln und ihren Bedürfnissen anpassen.
2008
Simone Braun, Andreas Schmidt, Andreas Walter, Valentin Zacharias
Using the Ontology Maturing Process Model for Searching, Managing and Retrieving Resources with Semantic Technologies
In: OnTheMove Federated Conferences 2008 (DAO, COOP, GADA, ODBASE), Monterrey, Mexico, Lecture Notes in Computer Science vol. , Springer, 2008
Abstract Semantic technologies are very helpful in improving existing systems for searching, managing and retrieving of resources, e.g. image search, bookmarking or expert finder systems. They enhance these systems through background knowledge stored in ontologies. However, in most cases, resources in these systems change very fast. In consequence, they require a dynamic and agile change of underlying ontologies. Also, the formality of these ontologies must fit the users needs and capabilities and must be appropriate and usable. Therefore, a continuous, collaborative and work or task integrated development of these ontologies is required. In this paper, we present how these requirements occur in real world applications and how they are solved and implemented using our Ontology Maturing Process Model.
Simone Braun, Andreas Schmidt
People Tagging & Ontology Maturing: Towards Collaborative Competence Management
In: 8th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems (COOP '08), Carry-le-Rouet, France, May 20-23, 2008, 2008
Abstract Competence Management approaches, aiming at making transparent individual competencies and their relationship to organizational goals, suggest promising instruments for more effective resource allocation, knowledge management, learning support, and human resource development in general. However, especially on the level of individual employees, such approaches have so far not been able to show sustainable success on a larger scale. Piloting applications like expert finders have often failed in the long run because of incomplete and outdated data, apart from social and organizational barriers. This affects both competency profiles of the individual employee and non-adequate and often also outdated competency catalogs used as a vocabulary for the profiles. To overcome these problems, we propose a collaborative competence management approach. In this approach, we combine Web 2.0-style bottom-up processes with organizational top-down processes: Web 2.0 oriented bottom-up processes allow every employee to participate and contribute with low usage barriers; i.e. by tagging colleagues; the organizational processes take up and guide these bottom-up developments towards organizational goals. Key idea is that we cannot do competence management completely without an agreed vocabulary (or ontology), i.e. the competency catalog, but we have to make the process of evolving this catalog more collaborative and embedded into its actual usage (e.g., while tagging other employees). Likewise, we do not conceive competency profiles as self-descriptions, but rather as results of collective judgments of others. We approached this problem as a collaborative ontology construction problem of which the conceptual foundation is the Ontology Maturing Process Model. In order to realize the Ontology Maturing Process Model for competence management, we have built the AJAX-based semantic social bookmarking application SOBOLEO that offers task-embedded competence ontology development and an easy-to-use interface.
Simone Braun, Andreas Schmidt, Andreas Walter, Valentin Zacharias
Von Tags zu semantischen Beziehungen: kollaborative Ontologiereifung
In: Birgit Gaiser and Thorsten Hampel and Stefanie Panke (eds.): Good Tags and Bad Tags - Social Tagging in der Wissensorganisation, Medien in der Wissenschaft vol. 47, Waxmann, 2008, pp. 163-173
Abstract Die Popularität von Tagging-Ansätzen hat gezeigt, dass dieses Ordnungsprinzip für Nutzer insbesondere auf kollaborativen Plattformen deutlich zugänglicher ist als strukturierte und kontrollierte Vokabulare. Allerdings stoßen Tagging-Ansätze oft an ihre Grenzen, wo sie keine ausreichende semantische Präzision ausbilden können. Umgekehrt können ontologiebasierte Ansätze zwar die semantische Präzision erreichen, werden jedoch (besonders aufgrund der schwerfälligen Pflegeprozesse) von den Nutzern kaum akzeptiert. Wir schlagen eine Verbindung beider Welten vor, die auf einer neuen Sichtweise auf die Entstehung von Ontologien fußt: die Ontologiereifung. Anhand zweier Werkzeuge aus dem Bereich des Social Semantic Bookmarking und der semantischen Bildsuche zeigen wir, wie Anwendungen aussehen können, die eine solche Ontologiereifung (in die jeweiligen Nutzungsprozesse integriert) ermöglichen und fördern.
2007
Simone Braun, Andreas Schmidt, Andreas Walter, Valentin Zacharias
The Ontology Maturing Approach to Collaborative and Work-Integrated Ontology Development: Evaluation Results and Future Directions
In: Luke Liming Chen and Philippe Cudré-Mauroux and Peter Haase and Andreas Hotho and Ernie Ong (eds.): Emergent Semantics and Ontology Evolution 2007. Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Emergent Semantics and Ontology Evolution (ESOE-2007), ISWC 2007, Busan, Korea, November 12, 2007., CEUR Workshop Proceedings vol. 292, 2007, pp. 5-18
Abstract Ontology maturing as a conceptual process model is based on the assumption that ontology engineering is a continuous collaborative and informal learning process and always embedded in tasks that make use of the ontology to be developed. For supporting ontology maturing, we need lightweight and easy-to-use tools integrating usage and construction processes of ontologies. Within two applications – ImageNotion for semantic annotation of images and SOBOLEO for semantically enriched social bookmarking – we have shown that such ontology maturing support is feasible with the help of Web 2.0 technologies. In this paper, we want to present the conclusions from two evaluation sessions with end users and summarize requirements for further development.
Valentin Zacharias, Andreas Abecker, Denny Vrandecic, Imen Borgi, Simone Braun, Andreas Schmidt
Mind the Web!
In: Ruzica Piskac and Frank van Harmelen and Ning Zhong (eds.): New Forms of Reasoning for the Semantic Web: Scalable, Tolerant and Dynamic 2007. Proceedings of the First International Workshop, ISWC 2007, Busan, Korea, November 11, 2007, CEUR Workshop Proceedings vol. 291, 2007
Abstract This paper argues that a significant part of today’s Semantic Web research is still dominated by ideas from centralized databases. Furthermore, the main thread of reasoning research focusses on approaches that can never scale to anything similar to the Web. Starting from these negative observations we argue that emergent semantics and ontology maturing are more suitable approaches for dealing with ontologies on the Web. Similarly, a few approaches for more Semantic Web appropriate reasoning exist, but are in dire need of realistic use cases.
Simone Braun, Andreas Schmidt, Valentin Zacharias
SOBOLEO: vom kollaborativen Tagging zur leichtgewichtigen Ontologie
In: Tom Gross (eds.): Mensch & Computer - 7. Fachübergreifende Konferenz - M&C 2007, Oldenbourg Verlag, 2007, pp. 209-218
Abstract Bisher gibt es kein integriertes Werkzeug, das sowohl die kollaborative Erstellung eines Indexes relevanter Internetressourcen („Social Bookmarking“) als auch einer gemeinsamen Ontologie, die zur Organisation des Indexes genutzt wird, integriert unterstützt. Derzeitige Werkzeuge gestatten entweder die Erstellung einer Ontologie oder die Strukturierung von Ressourcen entsprechend einer vorgegebenen, unveränderlichen Ontologie bzw. ganz ohne jegliche Struktur. In dieser Arbeit zeigen wir, wie sich kollaboratives Tagging und kollaborative Ontologieentwicklung vereinen lassen, so dass jeweilige Schwächen vermieden werden und die Stärken einander ergänzen. Wir präsentieren SOBOLEO, ein System, das kollaborativ und web-basiert die Erstellung, Erweiterung und Pflege von Ontologien und gemeinsamer Lesezeichensammlung ermöglicht und gleichzeitig die Annotierung von Internetressourcen mit Konzepten aus der erstellten Ontologie unterstützt.
Simone Braun, Andreas Schmidt, Valentin Zacharias
Ontology Maturing with Lightweight Collaborative Ontology Editing Tools
In: Norbert Gronau (eds.): 4th Conference on Professional Knowledge Management - Experiences and Visions, Workshop on Productive Knowledge Work (ProKW 07), GITO, 2007, pp. 217-226
Abstract Ontology building is an important prerequisite for state-of-the-art semantic technologies for knowledge worker support. But ontology engineering methods have so far neglected the early phase of ontology building where a conceptualization only exists rather informally and underlies continuous evolution through collaboration and interaction within the community. We have to view ontology building as a maturing process that requires collaborative editing support and the integration into the daily work processes of knowledge workers. In spirit of current Web 2.0 applications, we present an AJAX-based lightweight ontology editor as a first approach to this problem.
Simone Braun, Andreas Schmidt, Andreas Walter, Gabor Nagypal, Valentin Zacharias
Ontology Maturing: a Collaborative Web 2.0 Approach to Ontology Engineering
In: Natasha Noy and Harith Alani and Gerd Stumme and Peter Mika and York Sure and Denny Vrandecic (eds.): Proceedings of the Workshop on Social and Collaborative Construction of Structured Knowledge (CKC 2007) at the 16th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2007) Banff, Canada, May 8, 2007, CEUR Workshop Proceedings vol. 273, 2007
Abstract Most of the current methodologies for building ontologies rely on specialized knowledge engineers. This is in contrast to real-world settings, where the need for maintenance of domain specific ontologies emerges in the daily work of users. But in order to allow for participatory ontology engineering, we need to have a more realistic conceptual model of how ontologies develop in the real world. We introduce the ontology maturing processes which is based on the insight that ontology engineering is a collaborative informal learning process and for which we analyze characteristic evolution steps and triggers that have users engage in ontology engineering within their everyday work processes. This model integrates tagging and folksonomies with formal ontologies and shows maturing pathways between them. As implementations of this model, we present two case studies and the corresponding tools. The first is about image-based ontology engineering (introducing so-called imagenotions), the second about ontology-enabled social bookmarking (SOBOLEO). Both of them are inspired by lightweight Web 2.0 approaches and allow for realtime collaboration.
