28th January - 3rd February

I read Annotation of Multimedia using OntoMedia by K. Faith Lawrence et al., and we discussed it during Ontologies with a View.  OntoMedia might well prove useful in that describing the content of digital media can improve searching, sorting and sharing.

I started reading a couple of other papers by Faith, but haven't finished them yet, so expect summaries in the near future.

I brainstormed about decentralised networks, with thinking of ways of individuals sharing linked data about themselves and their projects without surrendering all that data to a server in mind.

19th November - 25th November

I read two papers about ontology development methodologies.

• Notes are here.

I read two articles by Bennett Haselton about decentralized social networking, which happened to pretty much sum up and beautifully articulate everything about that that has been floating in my subconscious for a couple of weeks.  I saw links to them in the latest Circumventor email, which I've been subscribed to since High School for bypassing the internal blacklist, and remain subscribed to because the jokes at the end are always laugh-out-loud funny.

I attended an all day course entitled 'practical project management for research students'.

• It was attended by a diverse bunch of seemingly really lovely people.
• The two ladies running it, from the IT Project Management department in the University, were lovely too.
• The stuff covered was all obvious, common sense stuff (and pleasantly the organisers didn't try to claim otherwise) - but sometimes it's helpful to have it all written down and waved in your face.  And structured, in particular.  Made me actually focus on thinking about organising my project.  The main thing I hadn't much considered, even subconsciously, was formally identifying stakeholders for a project and their relative interest/power in the project.
• There are a bunch of tools at projects.ed.ac.uk to aid in project management.
• It prompted me to do these week-in-review posts, as I realised I haven't been recording properly everything I've been doing (an overview of my time goes on my calendar, but no detail).
• The sandwiches weren't great, but fortunately when I got back to the Forum there were massive slabs of chocolate cake left over from some event.  I love the Forum.

I booked a place at the 1st International Open Data Dialogue in Berlin, and necessary flights.

• Despite the short notice, it worked out logistically because I need to be in London on the 7th anyway, so I can simply go to London on the 4th, fly to Berlin from there for the 5th and 6th, and back to London for the 7th.
• I'm particularly looking forward to "Open Statecraft: Openness as a Means (not an End)" by Philipp Müller, "The Open Data Movement vs. Business Models - is this a Contradiction?" by Dr. Peter A. Hecker, "Linked Open Data @ W3C-Vocabularies, Working Groups, Usage Scenarios" by Prof. Felix Sasaki, "The potential of Open Data for improving urban sustainability" by Dr. Marianne Linde and "Towards Trustworthiness: Establishing Transparency with Open Information Flows" by Dr. Edzard Höfig.
• I'm also looking forward being in Berlin again, even if it is just for one evening, and I'll probably be too exhausted to appreciate it.

Ontologies with a View took place at a different place and time to usual.

• And with added pancakes.

I started preparing for presenting at Digital Methods as a Mainstream Methodology in London in a couple of weeks.

• I scribbled lots of notes.
• I skimmed a few papers by organisers/speakers but didn't read any in detail yet.  Mostly stuff about analysing data gathered from comments, tweets etc. 
• There will be more about both of those things next week, I imagine.

I made a plan for the two weeks following the 20th.

• It mostly consists of finishing my Digital Methods preparation.  I have a lot of non-PhD related things to do as well, plus lots of travelling.  Also graduation from my MSc, and subsequent parental visitation will get in the way.

Yesterday I unexpectedly read two whole papers about ontology development methodologies.  They were open in tabs I don't remember opening, but presumably did so during our weekly Ontologies With A View meeting last Friday.  There are still a bunch more tabs open with papers or articles about the same thing, so maybe I'll read those later..

The notes are here more or less as I scribbled them down whilst reading, and I haven't expanded with any analysis or discussion as of yet.

Notes in purple are things I intend/need to investigate further; colour-coding is just for me, really.


Jean Vincent Fonou-Dombeu & Magda Husiman (2011)  Combining Ontology Development Methodologies and Semantic Web Platforms for E-government Domain Ontology Development.  International Journal of Web & Semantic Technology (IJWesT) Vol.2, No.2, April 2011 

• Start by describing ontology in a human-readable way, then turn to RDF (etc) to be machine readable.
• Says there's not sufficient practical research around existing technologies or ontology development guidelines that would allow non-experts in e-government domain to make ontologies.
  
• Uses framework from Uschold & King (see later in this post) to describe ontology - technique used here should be platform independent.
• Then uses UML to semi-formally represent ontology
• Uses Protege and Jena to convert to OWL and RDF

• Paper's goal is to produce guidelines for e-government developers to create semantic content AND strengthen adoption of Semantic Web technologies in governments (particularly developing countries).
  
• Outlines RDF, OWL, Protege and Jena (described as leading platforms; mentions other platforms: WebODE, OntoEdit, KAON1, Sesame).
  
• Very critical of other literature; either ontologies have been produced but no practical information given; they've been developed with proprietary platforms; or they're only conceptual and don't say how they could actually be constructed with existing technologies.  other studies have not focused on a methodological approach, which means nothing is easily repeatable.
  
• Detailed comparative studies of methodologies in:
• M. Fernandez-Lopez, “Overview of Methodologies for Building Ontologies, ” In Proceedings of the IJCAI-99 workshop on Ontologies and Problem-Solving Methods (KRR5), Stockholm, Sweden, 2 August, 1999. 
• H. Beck and H.S Pinto, “Overview of Approach, Methodologies, Standards, and Tools for Ontologies,” Agricultural Ontology Service (UNFAO), 2003. 
• C. Calero, F. Ruiz and M. Piattini, “Ontologies for Software Engineering and Software Technology, ” Calero.Ruiz.Piattini (Eds.), Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg, 2006.
  
• Case study: Ontology for monitoring development projects in developing countries (OntoDPM)
1. Create with Protege:
   
   • class heirarchies
   • slots
   • domain and range of slots
   • Based on the UML
   • Saved as OWL
2. Then put content in RDF with Jena

Mike Uschold and Martin King (1995*) Towards a Methodology for Building Ontologies. Workshop on Basic Ontological Issues in Knowledge Sharing, IJCAI-95.

• Steps:
1. identify purpose
2. build ontology
   
   • capture
   • coding
   • integrating existing ontologies
3. evaluation
4. documentation

• Purpose
• Many ontologies are intended for reuse
• Should survey purposes to clarify options for future projects
• Building
• Capture
• Identify key concepts and relationships in domain of interest
• Produce unambiguous text definitions for these
• Identify terms for these
• Agree on all of the above
• Coding
• Explicit representation of conceptualisation in a formal language (choose a language)
• When can capture and coding stages be merged?
• Differences between building ontology and creating a general knowledge base (thinking about methodology will help with this)
• Integrating (during either or both of above)
• Work must be done in agreement between communities
• Make explicit all assumptions underlying an ontology
• Evaluation
• Judge against requirements specification (and/or)
• Judge against competency questions (and/or)
• Judge against real life
• This paper looks at knowledge base systems, and adapts for ontologies.
• Documentation
• Desirable to have established guidelines for documenting
• Main barrier to effective knowledge sharing is inadequate documentation
• ALL important assumptions should be documented

• Case Study
• Main emphasis is on capture phase
• Initially:
• define ontology (Gruber)
• identify users and usage (initially abstract, then clarify with real life)
• choose language (Ontolingua was chosen)
• choose method for capture - BDSM (IBM) supported by others:
• KADS
• IDEF5
• OO Analysis and Design techinques
• Gruber's principles for ontology design
• Categorisation is fundamental to the human condition (Lakoff)
• Not heirarchical, but:
• GENERAL
         ^
     BASIC  ->  primary with respect to knowledge organisation
         v
  SPECIFIC
• eg.
        SUPER:   Animal    /   Furniture
        BASIC:    Dog        /   Chair
        SUB:        Retriever /   Rocker
• Certain concepts used subconsciously, rather than understood intellectually.
• These have a more important psychological status.
• Therefore paper uses middle-out approach to capture terms
• (bottom-up = too much detail unnecessarily,
• top-down = risks imprecision)
• BASIC concepts first because:
• most important
• used to define non-BASIC terms
• increase clarity, especially for non-technical use
• backed by BSDM experience of paper author
• Scoping
• Brainstorming
• Consult corpora if there aren't enough domain experts to brainstorm
• Grouping
• structure terms into naturally arising sub-groups
• collate synonyms
• consider things that might refer to each other
• Meta-ontology
• Don't commit too early, can restrict thinking.  Let concepts and relationships themselves determine requirements.
• Be consistent.
• Use technologically neutral language ('thing' vs 'entity').
• Start with areas where there's most overlap.
• Work from basic terms to more abstract ones within an area.
• Producing definitions
• Agreeing on definitions (varying degrees of problems)
• Handling ambiguous terms
• clarify ideas without technical terms
• use a dictionary!
• label definitions, eg. x1, x2
• determine most important concept
• choose a term, avoiding original ambigious one
• Avoid new terms
• Terms get in the way (peoples' preconceived ideas) - concentrate on underlying meaning and concepts.