Thesaurus and Ontology Construction for Contra Dance: Knowledge Organization of a North American Folk Dance Domain

This case study aims to preserve and disseminate cultural heritage information about the North American community folk dance tradition of contra dance through development of a thesaurus of choreographic terms and a domain ontology. A survey of dance resources was conducted, reviewing historic and modern examples of contra dance choreography notation and instructions, records of dance events, and recordings of dance performances. Domain and content analysis were performed on the resources to collect and organize concepts and themes regarding choreographic components and their relationships, the structure and function of cultural works, their creative expressions, and the evidence of those expressions in documents and recordings. Vocabulary used in the description of contra dance choreography was identified, classified, and notated to build a thesaurus, which was used as the basis of a domain ontology. Ontology building methodology and existing conceptual models for cultural heritage domains guided the ontology development and revision phases. The study also seeks to safeguard an intangible cultural heritage by applying knowledge organization and semantic approaches to folk dance in order to model such challenges as multiple, simultaneous modes of communication and forms of representation, modular conceptual components, descriptive sequences, differing levels of structured information, and complex cultural networks found at various levels of domain discourse.

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Ontological Conceptualization Based on the SKOS

Journal of Computing and Information Science in Engineering ◽

10.1115/1.4027582 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 14 (3) ◽

Cited By ~ 6

Author(s):

Farhad Ameri ◽

Boonserm Kulvatunyou ◽

Nenad Ivezic ◽

Khosrow Kaikhah

Keyword(s):

Domain Ontology ◽

Knowledge Organization ◽

Ontology Development ◽

Stepping Stone ◽

Simple Knowledge Organization System ◽

Knowledge Organization System ◽

Representation Formalism

Ontological conceptualization refers to the process of creating an abstract view of the domain of interest through a set of interconnected concepts. In this paper, a thesaurus-based methodology is proposed for systematic ontological conceptualization in the manufacturing domain. The methodology has three main phases, namely, thesaurus development, thesaurus evaluation, and thesaurus conversion and it uses simple knowledge organization system (SKOS) as the thesaurus representation formalism. The concept-based nature of a SKOS thesaurus makes it suitable for identifying important concepts in the domain. To that end, novel thesaurus evaluation and thesaurus conversion metrics that exploit this characteristic are presented. The ontology conceptualization methodology is demonstrated through the development of a manufacturing thesaurus, referred to as ManuTerms. The concepts in ManuTerms can be converted into ontological classes. The whole conceptualization process is the stepping stone to developing more axiomatic ontologies. Although the proposed methodology is developed in the context of manufacturing ontology development, the underlying methods, tools, and metrics can be applied to development of any domain ontology. The developed thesaurus can serve as a standalone lightweight ontology and its concepts can be reused by other ontologies or thesauri.

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OntoForInfoScience

Brazilian Journal of Information Science ◽

10.36311/1981-1640.2016.v10n1.02.p12 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 10 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Fabrício Martins Mendonça ◽

Maurício Barcellos Almeida

Keyword(s):

Information Science ◽

Domain Ontology ◽

Knowledge Organization ◽

Ontology Development ◽

Blood Components ◽

Development Cycle ◽

Scientific Project ◽

Per Se

Ontologies are instruments of knowledge organization that have been developed through several methodologies. These methodologies are well established, but their steps often are not well explained. Thus, only knowledge engineers are able to perform all steps required in the development of ontologies. Here, we describe a methodology that details each step of the ontology development cycle. The goal of this methodology - called OntoForInfoScience - is to overcome issues of technical jargon and logical-philosophical principles faced by experts in Knowledge Organization from the field of Information Science. These are the usual issues when one deals with and constructs ontologies. In order to identify those issues, our methodology was produced by information scientists during the development of ontology in the blood domain. This ontology, called Hemonto, is domain ontology about blood components under development within the scope of a scientific project. In this paper, we present a brief description of OntoForInfoScience, as well as the practical results of the development of the blood ontology. We conclude that the new methodology is useful for information scientists when creating formal ontological representations. In addition to the methodology per se, our research also provides partial results of the HEMONTO development.

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