The Epilepsy Ontology: a community-based ontology tailored for semantic interoperability and text-mining

Motivation: Epilepsy is a multi-faceted complex disorder that requires a precise understanding of the classification, diagnosis, treatment, and disease mechanism governing it. Although scattered resources are available on epilepsy, comprehensive and structured knowledge is missing. In contemplation to promote multidisciplinary knowledge exchange and facilitate advancement in clinical management, especially in pre-clinical research, a disease-specific ontology is necessary. The presented ontology is designed to enable better interconnection between scientific community members in the epilepsy domain.Results: The Epilepsy Ontology (EPIO) is an assembly of structured knowledge on various aspects of epilepsy, developed according to Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) and Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology (OBO) Foundry principles. Concepts and definitions are collected from the latest International League against Epilepsy (ILAE) classification, domain-specific ontologies, and scientific literature. This ontology consists of 1,879 classes and 28,151 axioms (2,171 declaration axioms, 2,219 logical axioms) from several aspects of epilepsy. This ontology is intended to be used for data management and text mining purposes.

Towards a Unified Dispositional Framework for Realizable Entities

Realizable entities are properties that can be realized in processes of specific correlated types in which the bearer participates. It will be valuable to create a systematic classification of realizable entities because they are useful for various modeling purposes in ontologies. In this paper we outline a unifying framework for realizable entities (including dispositions and roles) in the upper ontology Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) that is theoretically underpinned by J. McKitrick’s pragmatic approach to dispositions. In particular, we develop a formal ontological account of “extrinsic dispositions” and illustrate its potential applications with clarification of functions and roles in BFO.

Approaching Healthy City Ontology: First-Level Classes Definition Using BFO

In recent decades, the concept of the healthy city (HC) has become more and more relevant in many fields, such as city administration and scientific environment, and has become a commonly understood concept in the general public. Due to the breakneck growth of people living in urban contexts, the subsequent necessity to guarantee good urban conditions for all kinds of citizens, and the general deterioration of the hearth environment caused by human activities (concentrated in urban settlements), this issue is increasing in its relevance. In this paper, the authors discuss the concept of the HC from an ontological point of view to organize the highly complex system of elements and the mutual relations that constitute the idea of HC. The main goals of an HC are quite intuitive, but the number of components that define and manage it is vast and related to different disciplines: sustainability, urban management, urban planning, and health and social studies. With the presented research, the authors intend to start an organizational definition of the HC using basic formal ontology (BFO). Considering the definition of HC, the authors focus on the ontology process and the different typologies of ontological structures. Then, the authors describe a first-level scheme of HC ontology and, finally, discuss possible applications of the presented study and next research steps.

A Bottom-up Ontology-based Approach to Monitor Circular Economy: Aligning User Expectations, Tools, Data and Theory

With circular economy being high on governmental agendas, there is an increasing request from governing bodies for circularity measurements. Yet currently existing macro-level monitoring frameworks are widely criticized for not being able to inform the decision making. The reasons behind their failure stem from a lack of consensus on terminologies and definitions among scholars, politicians and practitioners, a lack of supporting data and tools and, consequently, a lack of transparency and trustworthiness.To fulfill those needs, a bottom-up approach to build a shared terminology is suggested by involving macro-framework users within a government, data providers and tool developers. Their expertise and expectations for monitoring the transition are elicited through the process of formal ontology development and alignment.The ontology development experiment builds upon a use case of the Amsterdam Circular Economy Monitor (2020). First, four ontology development approaches are used to create a theory-centered, a user-centered, a tool-centered and a data-centered ontology. The ontologies are later compared, merged, and aligned with each other to arrive at one single ontology. The notes taken during the process are used to provide a detailed discussion on common concepts, identified conflicts, and gaps in monitoring expectations between the monitor users, data, tools, and the latest theory.

UFO: Unified Foundational Ontology

The Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) was developed over the last two decades by consistently putting together theories from areas such as formal ontology in philosophy, cognitive science, linguistics, and philosophical logics. It comprises a number of micro-theories addressing fundamental conceptual modeling notions, including entity types and relationship types. The aim of this paper is to summarize the current state of UFO, presenting a formalization of the ontology, along with the analysis of a number of cases to illustrate the application of UFO and facilitate its comparison with other foundational ontologies in this special issue. (The cases originate from the First FOUST Workshop – the Foundational Stance, an international forum dedicated to Foundational Ontology research.)

Developing an Ontology Evaluation Methodology: Cognitive Measure of Quality

<p>Ontologies are formal specifications of shared conceptualizations of a domain. Important applications of ontologies include distributed knowledge based systems, such as the semantic web, and the evaluation of modelling languages, e.g. for business process or conceptual modelling. These applications require formal ontologies of good quality. In this thesis, we present a multi-method ontology evaluation methodology, which consists of two techniques (sentence verification task and recall) based on principles of cognitive psychology, to test how well a specification of a formal ontology corresponds to the ontology users' conceptualization of a domain. Two experiments were conducted, each evaluating the SUMO ontology and WordNet with an experimental technique, as demonstrations of the multi-method evaluation methodology. We also tested the applicability of the two evaluation techniques by conducting a replication study for each. The replication studies obtained findings that point towards the same direction as the original studies, although no significance was achieved. Overall, the evaluation using the multi-method methodology suggests that neither of the two ontologies we examined is a good specification of the conceptualization of the domain. Both the terminology and the structure of the ontologies, may benefit from improvement.</p>

Developing an Ontology Evaluation Methodology: Cognitive Measure of Quality

<p>Ontologies are formal specifications of shared conceptualizations of a domain. Important applications of ontologies include distributed knowledge based systems, such as the semantic web, and the evaluation of modelling languages, e.g. for business process or conceptual modelling. These applications require formal ontologies of good quality. In this thesis, we present a multi-method ontology evaluation methodology, which consists of two techniques (sentence verification task and recall) based on principles of cognitive psychology, to test how well a specification of a formal ontology corresponds to the ontology users' conceptualization of a domain. Two experiments were conducted, each evaluating the SUMO ontology and WordNet with an experimental technique, as demonstrations of the multi-method evaluation methodology. We also tested the applicability of the two evaluation techniques by conducting a replication study for each. The replication studies obtained findings that point towards the same direction as the original studies, although no significance was achieved. Overall, the evaluation using the multi-method methodology suggests that neither of the two ontologies we examined is a good specification of the conceptualization of the domain. Both the terminology and the structure of the ontologies, may benefit from improvement.</p>

BFO-based ontology enhancement to promote interoperability in BIM

Building Information Modelling (BIM) is a process for managing construction project information in such a way as to provide a basis for enhanced decision-making and for collaboration in a construction supply chain. One impediment to the uptake of BIM is the limited interoperability of different BIM systems. To overcome this problem, a set of Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) has been proposed as a standard for the construction industry. Building on IFC, the ifcOWL ontology was developed in order to facilitate representation of building data in a consistent fashion across the Web by using the Web Ontology Language (OWL). This study presents a critical analysis of the ifcOWL ontology and of the associated interoperability issues. It shows how these issues can be resolved by using Basic Formal Ontology (ISO/IEC 21838-2) as top-level architecture. A set of competency questions is used as the basis for comparison of the original ifcOWL with the enhanced ontology, and the latter is used to align with a second ontology – the ontology for building intelligent environments (DOGONT) – in order to demonstrate the added value derived from BFO by showing how querying the enhanced ifcOWL yields useful additional information.

ContSOnto: A Formal Ontology for Continuity of Care

The global pandemic over the past two years has reset societal agendas by identifying both strengths and weaknesses across all sectors. Focusing in particular on global health delivery, the ability of health care facilities to scale requirements and to meet service demands has detected the need for some national services and organisations to modernise their organisational processes and infrastructures. Core to requirements for modernisation is infrastructure to share information, specifically structural standardised approaches for both operational procedures and terminology services. Problems of data sharing (aka interoperability) is a main obstacle when patients are moving across healthcare facilities or travelling across border countries in cases where emergency treatment is needed. Experts in healthcare service delivery suggest that the best possible way to manage individual care is at home, using remote patient monitoring which ultimately reduces cost burden both for the citizen and service provider. Core to this practice will be advancing digitalisation of health care underpinned with safe integration and access to relevant and timely information. To tackle the data interoperability issue and provide a quality driven continuous flow of information from different health care information systems semantic terminology needs to be provided intact. In this paper we propose and present ContSonto a formal ontology for continuity of care based on ISO 13940:2015 ContSy and W3C Semantic Web Standards Language OWL (Web Ontology Language). ContSonto has several benefits including semantic interoperability, data harmonization and data linking. It can be use as a base model for data integration for different healthcare information models to generate knowledge graph to support shared care and decision making.