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The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the construction of a core ontology for food. To construct the core ontology, the authors propose here an approach called, yet another methodology for ontology plus (YAMO+). The goal is to exhibit the construction of a core ontology for a domain, which can be further extended and converted into application ontologies.

To motivate the construction of the core ontology for food, the authors have first articulated a set of application scenarios. The idea is that the constructed core ontology can be used to build application-specific ontologies for those scenarios. As part of the developmental approach to core ontology, the authors have proposed a methodology called YAMO+. It is designed following the theory of analytico-synthetic classification. YAMO+ is generic in nature and can be applied to build core ontologies for any domain.

Construction of a core ontology needs a thorough understanding of the domain and domain requirements. There are various challenges involved in constructing a core ontology as discussed in this paper. The proposed approach has proven to be sturdy enough to face the challenges that the construction of a core ontology poses. It is observed that core ontology is amenable to conversion to an application ontology.

The constructed core ontology for domain food can be readily used for developing application ontologies related to food. The proposed methodology YAMO+ can be applied to build core ontologies for any domain.

As per the knowledge, the proposed approach is the first attempt based on the study of the state of the art literature, in terms of, a formal approach to the design of a core ontology. Also, the constructed core ontology for food is the first one as there is no such ontology available on the web for domain food.

Matter is an important topic of science as a discipline since its inception. Nevertheless, along with the evolution of semantic web, matter has got equal importance among the ontology developers. The current work describes an ontology of matter that the authors developed in the lab. The purpose of this paper is to come up with an exhaustive list of concepts and relations to cover matter domain under one umbrella, after identifying the gaps in the present ontologies.

Ontology was developed following faceted analytico-synthetic approach of knowledge organization. The authors followed hybrid developmental approach which includes top-down as well as bottom-up development strategy, for creating classes and subclasses. The authors modelled matter domain comprehensively considering different aspects of matter. The theories behind the modelling approach helps to maintain the consistency of further extensions.

Final ontology has around 280 concepts and as many as 60 properties which include both object property and datatype property.

There exists very vague definition of concepts in different subject areas, as matter is a domain of study in physics, chemistry, material science, metallurgy, etc. Same material has been adopted differently depending upon purpose of its study/use in that field. For example aspirin is simply a chemical compound in chemistry, whereas in medicine it is also an agent.

Present work claims to influence the ontology engineers to develop more extension to this core ontology of matter (COMAT). Also this will find its use in information retrieval, semantic annotations and in several other semantic knowledge-based systems.

COMAT is the most recent work of the domain. Originality lies in the way matter domain has been looked up, from a very wide perspective, as well as in the approach of modelling the domain.

With the increasing complexity of public–private partnership (PPP) projects, the amount of data generated during the construction process is massive. This paper aims to develop a new information management method to cope with the risk problems involved in dealing with such data, based on domain ontologies of the construction industry, to help manage PPP risks, share and reuse risk knowledge.

Risk knowledge concepts are acquired and summarized through PPP failure cases and an extensive literature review to establish a domain framework for risk knowledge using ontology technology to help manage PPP risks.

The results indicate that the risk ontology is capable of capturing key concepts and relationships involved in managing PPP risks and can be used to facilitate knowledge reuse and storage beneficial to risk management.

The classes in the risk knowledge ontology model constructed in this research do not yet cover all the information in PPP project risks and need to be further extended. Moreover, only the framework and basic methods needed are developed, while the construction of a working ontology model and the relationship between implicit and explicit knowledge is a complicated process that requires repeated modifications and evaluations before it can be implemented.

The ontology provides a basis for turning PPP risk information into risk knowledge to allow the effective sharing and communication of project risks between different project stakeholders. It can also have the potential to help reduce the dependence on subjectivity by mining, using and storing tacit knowledge in the risk management process.

The apparent suitability of the nine classes of PPP risk knowledge (project model, risk type, risk occurrence stage, risk source, risk consequence, risk likelihood, risk carrier, risk management measures and risk case) is identified, and the proposed construction method and steps for a complete domain ontology for PPP risk management are unique. A combination of criteria- and task-based evaluations is also developed for assessing the PPP risk ontology for the first time.

Systematic organization of domain knowledge has many advantages in archiving, sharing and retrieval of information. Ontologies provide a cushion for such practices in the semantic Web environment. This study aims to develop an ontology that can preserve the knowledge base of traditional dance practices.

It is hypothesized that an ontology-based approach for the chosen domain might boost collaborative research prospects in the domain. A systematic methodology was developed for modeling the ontology based on the analytico-synthetic rule of library classification. Protégé 5.2 was used as an editor for the ontology using the Web ontology language combined with description logic axioms. Ontology was later implemented in a local GraphDB repository to run queries over it.

The developed ontology on traditional dances (OTD) was tested using the dances of the Rabha tribes of North East India. Rabha tribes are from an indigenous mongoloid community and have a robust presence in Southeast Asian countries, such as Myanmar, Thailand, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Nepal. The result from HermiT reasoner found the presence of no logical inconsistency in the ontology, while the OOPS! pitfall checker tool reported no major internal inconsistency. The induced knowledge base of traditional dances of the Rabha’s in the developed OTD was further validated based on some competency questions.

In the growing trend of globalization, preservation of the cultural knowledge base of human societies is an important issue. Traditional dances reflect a strong base of the cultural heritage of human societies as they are closely related to the lifestyle, habitat, religious practices and festivals of a specific community.

The current study is exclusively designed, keeping in mind the variables of traditional dance domain based on a survey of the user- and domain-specific needs. The ontology finds probable uses in traditional knowledge information systems, lifestyle-based e-commerce sites and e-learning platforms.

The purpose of this paper is to improve the conceptual-based search by incorporating structural ontological information such as concepts and relations. Generally, Semantic-based information retrieval aims to identify relevant information based on the meanings of the query terms or on the context of the terms and the performance of semantic information retrieval is carried out through standard measures-precision and recall. Higher precision leads to the (meaningful) relevant documents obtained and lower recall leads to the less coverage of the concepts.

In this paper, the authors enhance the existing ontology-based indexing proposed by Kohler et al., by incorporating sibling information to the index. The index designed by Kohler et al., contains only super and sub-concepts from the ontology. In addition, in our approach, we focus on two tasks; query expansion and ranking of the expanded queries, to improve the efficiency of the ontology-based search. The aforementioned tasks make use of ontological concepts, and relations existing between those concepts so as to obtain semantically more relevant search results for a given query.

The proposed ontology-based indexing technique is investigated by analysing the coverage of concepts that are being populated in the index. Here, we introduce a new measure called index enhancement measure, to estimate the coverage of ontological concepts being indexed. We have evaluated the ontology-based search for the tourism domain with the tourism documents and tourism-specific ontology. The comparison of search results based on the use of ontology “with and without query expansion” is examined to estimate the efficiency of the proposed query expansion task. The ranking is compared with the ORank system to evaluate the performance of our ontology-based search. From these analyses, the ontology-based search results shows better recall when compared to the other concept-based search systems. The mean average precision of the ontology-based search is found to be 0.79 and the recall is found to be 0.65, the ORank system has the mean average precision of 0.62 and the recall is found to be 0.51, while the concept-based search has the mean average precision of 0.56 and the recall is found to be 0.42.

When the concept is not present in the domain-specific ontology, the concept cannot be indexed. When the given query term is not available in the ontology then the term-based results are retrieved.

In addition to super and sub-concepts, we incorporate the concepts present in same level (siblings) to the ontological index. The structural information from the ontology is determined for the query expansion. The ranking of the documents depends on the type of the query (single concept query, multiple concept queries and concept with relation queries) and the ontological relations that exists in the query and the documents. With this ontological structural information, the search results showed us better coverage of concepts with respect to the query.

This paper describes a software architecture that automatically adds semantic capabilities to data services. The proposed architecture, called OntoGenesis, is able to semantically enrich data services, so that they can dynamically provide both semantic descriptions and data representations.

The enrichment approach is designed to intercept the requests from data services. Therefore, a domain ontology is constructed and evolved in accordance with the syntactic representations provided by such services in order to define the data concepts. In addition, a property matching mechanism is proposed to exploit the potential data intersection observed in data service representations and external data sources so as to enhance the domain ontology with new equivalences triples. Finally, the enrichment approach is capable of deriving on demand a semantic description and data representations that link to the domain ontology concepts.

Experiments were performed using real-world datasets, such as DBpedia, GeoNames as well as open government data. The obtained results show the applicability of the proposed architecture and that it can boost the development of semantic data services. Moreover, the matching approach achieved better performance when compared with other existing approaches found in the literature.

This work only considers services designed as data providers, i.e., services that provide an interface for accessing data sources. In addition, our approach assumes that both data services and external sources – used to enhance the domain ontology – have some potential of data intersection. Such assumption only requires that services and external sources share particular property values.

Unlike most of the approaches found in the literature, the architecture proposed in this paper is meant to semantically enrich data services in such way that human intervention is minimal. Furthermore, an automata-based index is also presented as a novel method that significantly improves the performance of the property matching mechanism.

Most local governance assessment tools are entirely or partially based on stakeholders’ surveys, focus groups and benchmarks of different local governments in the world. These tools remain a subjective way of local governance evaluation. To measure the performance of local good-governance using an unbiased assessment technique, the authors have developed a framework to help automate the design process of a data warehouse (DW), which provides local and central decision-makers with factual, measurable and accurate local government data to help assess the performance of local government. The purpose of this paper is to propose the extraction of the DW schema based on a mixed approach that adopts both i* framework for requirements-based representation and domain ontologies for data source representation, to extract the multi-dimensional (MD) elements. The data was collected from various sources and information systems (ISs) deployed in different municipalities.

The authors present a framework for the design and implementation of a DW for local good-governance assessment. The extraction of facts and dimensions of the DW’s MD schema is done using a hybrid approach, where the extraction of requirement-based DW schema and source-based DW schema are done in parallel followed by the reconciliation of the obtained schemas to obtain the good-governance assessment DW final design.

The authors developed a novel framework to design and implement a DW for local good-governance assessment. The framework enables the extraction of the DW MD schema by using domain ontologies to help capture semantic artifacts and minimize misconceptions and misunderstandings between different stakeholders. The introduction and use of domain ontologies during the design process serves the generalization and automation purpose of the framework.

The presently conducted research faced two main limitations as follows: the first is the full automation of the design process of the DW and the second, and most important, is access to local government data as it remains limited because of the lack of digitally stored data in municipalities, especially in developing countries in addition to the difficulty of accessing the data because of regulatory aspects and bureaucracy.

The local government environment is among the public administrations most subject to change-adverse cultures and where the authors can face high levels of resistance and significant difficulties during the implementation of decision support systems, despite the commitment/engagement of decision-makers. Access to data sources stored by different ISs might be challenging. While approaching the municipalities for data access, it was done in the framework of a research project within one of the most notorious universities in the country, which gave more credibility and trust to the research team. There is also a need for further testing of the framework to reveal its scalability and performance characteristics.

Compared to other local government assessment ad hoc tools that are partially or entirely based on subjectively collected data, the framework provides a basis for automated design of a comprehensive local government DW using e-government domain ontologies for data source representation coupled with the goal, rationale and business process diagrams for user requirements representations, thus enabling the extraction of the final DW MD schema.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate and evaluate the semantic process benchmarking concept.

The authors' approach includes the use of metamodels and ontologies, which make the process models syntactically and semantically comparable. Furthermore, a software prototype is presented to analyze and compare individual process models and their performance information. Thereafter, the technical, conceptual, and economic perspectives of the approach's evaluation are aligned with their respective outcomes.

The evaluation proves that this approach is generally suitable to generate novel and useful information on different process models and their performance within the same problem domain. However, the initial set‐up costs are high and will only pay off once process models are used regularly.

The proposed approach depends strongly on the availability of appropriate metrics and ontologies, as well as on the annotation of these ontologies to process models, which is a time‐consuming task. If large benchmarking clearing centers are established, the approach will be more cost‐effective. The developed SEMAT prototype, that demonstrates and proves the proposed approach's general viability, supports cost‐effective ontology engineering and annotation in the context of semantic process benchmarking initiatives.

To date, process benchmarking has primarily been a manual process. In this article, the authors suggest an approach that allows time‐consuming and costly process analysis to be partially automated, which makes the performance indicators, as well as qualitative differences between processes, apparent.

Connectivism has been proposed to explain the impact of new technologies on learning. According to this approach, learning may occur even outside the individual within an organization or a system. Learning objectives are not defined in advance and learning requires the ability to form connections and use networks to find the required knowledge. The connections by which individuals can learn are more important than what they currently know. The purpose of this paper is to investigate if a measure, rating the importance of concepts, can be derived from a network representation of the learning domain and if highly connected concepts – with high importance value – can describe whether information is explored in such ways as assumed by connectivism.

The authors empirically examined if the proposed measure can provide insight on the role of connections in learning and explain the reasons behind passing certain parts of a test using a linear regression model.

The results are twofold. First, an implementation of the information exploration principle of connectivism has been introduced, applying semantic technologies and the importance measure. Second, although no significant effects could be isolated, trends in performance improvement concerning highly important concepts were identified.

However, connectivism has been known since 2005, it is still lacking for successful implementations. The presented approach of a concept importance measure is a promising starting point by providing means of connected learning, enabling individuals to effectively improve their personal abilities to better fit job demand.

Ontologies are prone to wide semantic variability due to subjective points of view of their composers. The purpose of this paper is to propose a new approach for maximal unification of diverse ontologies for controversial domains by their relations.

Effective matching or unification of multiple ontologies for a specific domain is crucial for the success of many semantic web applications, such as semantic information retrieval and organization, document tagging, summarization and search. To this end, numerous automatic and semi-automatic techniques were proposed in the past decade that attempt to identify similar entities, mostly classes, in diverse ontologies for similar domains. Apparently, matching individual entities cannot result in full integration of ontologies’ semantics without matching their inter-relations with all other-related classes (and instances). However, semantic matching of ontological relations still constitutes a major research challenge. Therefore, in this paper the authors propose a new paradigm for assessment of maximal possible matching and unification of ontological relations. To this end, several unification rules for ontological relations were devised based on ontological reference rules, and lexical and textual entailment. These rules were semi-automatically implemented to extend a given ontology with semantically matching relations from another ontology for a similar domain. Then, the ontologies were unified through these similar pairs of relations. The authors observe that these rules can be also facilitated to reveal the contradictory relations in different ontologies.

To assess the feasibility of the approach two experiments were conducted with different sets of multiple personal ontologies on controversial domains constructed by trained subjects. The results for about 50 distinct ontology pairs demonstrate a good potential of the methodology for increasing inter-ontology agreement. Furthermore, the authors show that the presented methodology can lead to a complete unification of multiple semantically heterogeneous ontologies.

This is a conceptual study that presents a new approach for semantic unification of ontologies by a devised set of rules along with the initial experimental evidence of its feasibility and effectiveness. However, this methodology has to be fully automatically implemented and tested on a larger dataset in future research.

This result has implication for semantic search, since a richer ontology, comprised of multiple aspects and viewpoints of the domain of knowledge, enhances discoverability and improves search results.

To the best of the knowledge, this is the first study to examine and assess the maximal level of semantic relation-based ontology unification.