Presentation of Debruyne, C., and Meersman, R. (2011) Semantic Interoperation of Information Systems by Evolving Ontologies through Formalized Social Processes. In Proc. of Advances in Databases and Information Systems 2011 (ADBIS 2011) - September 2011 Abstract: For autonomously developed information systems to interoperate in a meaningful manner, ontologies capturing the intended semantics of that interoperation have to be developed by a community of stakeholders in those information systems. As the requirements of the ontology and the ontology itself evolve, so in general will the community, and vice versa. Ontology construction should thus be viewed as a complex activity leading to formalized semantic agreement involving various social processes within the community, and that may translate into a number of ontology evolution operators to be implemented. The hybrid ontologies that emerge in this way indeed need to support both the social agreement processes in the stakeholder communities and the eventual reasoning implemented in the information systems that are governed by these ontologies. In this paper, we discuss formal aspects of the social processes involved, a so-called fact-oriented methodology and formalism to structure and describe these, as well as certain relevant aspects of the communities in which they occur. We also report on a prototypical tool set that supports such a methodology, and on examples of some early experiments.

1. Semantic Interoperation of
IS through Formalized
Social Processes
Christophe Debruyne and Robert Meersman
30/10/11 Herhaling titel van presentatie 1

2. Introduction
Information systems (IS) on the Web are in general
developed and maintained autonomously
For IS to interoperate, an ontology is needed
– Agreement among all the stakeholders
– Ontologies evolve while the agreements are developed
– Ontologies are an externalization of the semantics outside an IS
Ontology Engineering (OE) is a critical activity
Semantic Interoperation of IS through
Formalized Social Processes
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3. Contribution
We discuss the social processes involved in ontology
engineering and the role of natural language
descriptions
We present a method and
formalism to structure these
We developed a prototype that supports the method
Semantic Interoperation of IS through
Formalized Social Processes
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4. Method
Use of structured NL
– Vehicle to elicit useful and
relevant concepts from community communication
– Mapping of these social processes to evolutionary process of
the emerging ontology
In conceptualizations, rigorously separate facts
from all application specific interpretations
– Interpretations are performed by constraining the mapping
between application systems and the fact base of the
ontology
Semantic Interoperation of IS through
Formalized Social Processes
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5. ! ! ! Context-
Method identifiers, pointers to a
community
DOGMA Ontology Descriptions <!, ci, K>
– ! a lexon base, a finite set of plausible binary fact types called
lexons <!, t1, r1, r2, t2>
<Vendor Community, Offer, has, is of, Title>
– ci a partial function mapping context-identifiers and terms to
concepts
– K a finite set of ontological commitments containing
– A selection of lexons
– A mapping from application symbols to ontology terms
– Predicates over those terms and roles to express constraints
Semantic Interoperation of IS through
Formalized Social Processes
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6. Method
Example of a commitment
Ω-RIDL: Verheyden et al. (SWDB 2004), Trog et al. (RuleML 2007)
Semantic Interoperation of IS through
Formalized Social Processes
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7. Method
The hybrid aspect of ontologies
– Ontologies are resources shared among humans working in a
community, and (networked) systems
– Mapping of terms to a concept is the result of a community
agreement
– Capture those agreements, turn comunities into first class
citizens of the ontology, resulting notion called hybrid ontology
– Fundamental technology: formalized glossaries, special linguistic
resources to support the agreement process
Semantic Interoperation of IS through
Formalized Social Processes
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8. Method
Hybrid Ontology Description (HOD) !!=<!,G>
– ! is a DOGMA Ontology Description
– The contexts in ! are called communities
– G is a glossary, a triple with components
– Gloss, a set of linguistic, human-interpretable glosses
– g1, mapping community-term pairs to glosses
– g2, mapping lexons to glosses
⟨VCard Community, Email Address⟩ à “The address
of an email, a system of world-wide electronic
communication in which a user can compose a
message at one terminal that can be regenerated at
the recipient’s terminal when the recipient logs in”
Semantic Interoperation of IS through
Formalized Social Processes
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9. Method
Glossaries
– Glossary coherence: descriptions of lexons imply the description
of its terms
– Glossary consistence: for every two community-term pairs, if
those terms are described with the same gloss, then the
communities involved should agree that they refer to the same
concept
– The converse does not necessarily hold
– Too strong a constraint to be practical
Semantic Interoperation of IS through
Formalized Social Processes
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10. Method
Glossaries
– Term-equivalence EQT. Given communities !1, !2 and term t,
we say that the two term glosses g1(!1,t)=gloss1 and
g1(!2,t)=gloss2 are term-equivalent if any two communities
agree that the given term refers to the same concept for both
– Community-equivalence EQ!. Given community ! and two
terms t1, t2, we say that the two term glosses g1(!,t1)=gloss1
and g1(!,t2)=gloss2 are community-equivalent if that
community agrees that the described terms refer to the same
concept.
Semantic Interoperation of IS through
Formalized Social Processes
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11. Method
Glossaries
– Term adoption. We say that community !1 adopts community-
term pair <!2,t> iff
– g1(!1,t)=gloss1 and g1(!2,t)=gloss2 are defined
– EQT(gloss1,gloss2) they first “match” the two glosses
– ci(!1,t)=ci(!2,t) they agree that both concepts are equal
– Term adoption is an assymetrical property
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Formalized Social Processes
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12. Method
Semantic Interoperation of IS through
Formalized Social Processes
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13. Method
Social Processes
Business Semantics Management: De Leenheer et al. Computers in Industry 2010
Semantic Interoperation of IS through
Formalized Social Processes
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14. Method
Social Processes
– Scope: create motivation, scope problem, add/remove members,
propose resources
– Create: request to add lexon, request to add constraint
– Refine: request to remove lexon, request to remove constraint,
request to change supertype of term, request to change lexon
hierarchy
– Articulate: request to add/remove/change gloss, request to add/
remove synonym
– At any time: request for edit/peer review/information/help,
comment and reply
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Formalized Social Processes
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15. Method
Implementation of the ontology
OWL, RDF(S), …
Semantic Interoperation of IS through
Formalized Social Processes
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16. Method
Externalizations/Re-internalization
– Commitments in the feed back loop
– Commitments provide valuable information on how members
commit to the ontology
– Used to generate queries to guide the dialogue in achieving
agreement
Onto-Clippy!
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Formalized Social Processes
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17. Tool
First version built in Collibra’s tool suite for ontology
engineering
– http://www.collibra.com/
– Built around XWiki technology
Second version built as a web application
– Built to be driven by social processes
– Follows the proposed formalism
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Formalized Social Processes
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18. Tool (old)
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Formalized Social Processes
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19. Experiment
45 students, 3 communities:
– Vendors
– Request for Proposals (RFP)
– Product (common for both)
Goal à reach agreement within and across
communities to exchange data
Results led to refinement of the ideas and a new
version of the prototype.
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Formalized Social Processes
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20. Pag.

21. Discussion oriented
Pag.

22. Pag.

23. Method
Semantic Interoperation of IS through
Formalized Social Processes
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24. Conclusions
We discussed the social processes involved in ontology
engineering and the role of natural language
descriptions
We presented a method and formalism to structure
these
We developed a prototype that supports the method
Semantic Interoperation of IS through
Formalized Social Processes
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25. Future Work
Additional experiments
– Open Semantic Cloud for Brussels (http://www.oscb.be/)
– TAS3 Trusted Architecture for Securely Shared Services
Identification of more operators on glosses and
concepts
Capturing the types of agreements
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Formalized Social Processes
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26. Questions?
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Formalized Social Processes
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