DOGMA, short for Developing Ontology-Grounded Methods and Applications, is the name of research project in progress at Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Vrije Universiteit Brussel

The Vrije Universiteit Brussel is a Flemish university located in Brussels, Belgium. It has two campuses referred to as Etterbeek and Jette.The university's name is sometimes abbreviated by "VUB" or translated to "Free University of Brussels"...

's STARLab, Semantics Technology and Applications Research Laboratory. It is an internally funded project, concerned with the more general aspects of extracting, storing, representing and browsing information.

Technical Introduction

DOGMA is an ontology approach and framework that is not restricted to a particular representation language. This approach has some distinguishing characteristics that make it different from traditional ontology approaches such as (i) its groundings in the linguistic representations of knowledge and (ii) the methodological separation of the domain-versus-application conceptualization, which is called the ontology double articulation

Ontology double articulation

The notion of Ontology Double Articulation refers to a methodological principle in ontology engineering.The idea is that an ontology should be built as separate domain axiomatizations and application axiomatization. In other words an application axiomatization should be built in terms of a domain...

 principle. The idea is to enhance the potential for re-use and design scalability. Conceptualisations are materialised in terms of lexons. A lexon is a 5-tuple declaring either (in some context G):

1. taxonomical relationship (genus): e.g., < G, manager, is a, subsumes, person >;
2. non-taxonomical relationship (differentia): e.g.', < G, manager, directs, directed by, company >.

Lexons could be approximately considered as a combination of an RDF

Resource Description Framework

The Resource Description Framework is a family of World Wide Web Consortium specifications originally designed as a metadata data model...

/OWL

Web Ontology Language

The Web Ontology Language is a family of knowledge representation languages for authoring ontologies.The languages are characterised by formal semantics and RDF/XML-based serializations for the Semantic Web...

 triple and its inverse, or as a conceptual graph style relation (Sowa, 1984). The next section elaborates more on the notions of context.

Language versus Conceptual Level

Another distinguishing characteristic of DOGMA is the explicit duality

Dualism

Dualism denotes a state of two parts. The term 'dualism' was originally coined to denote co-eternal binary opposition, a meaning that is preserved in metaphysical and philosophical duality discourse but has been diluted in general or common usages. Dualism can refer to moral dualism, Dualism (from...

 (orthogonal to double articulation

Double articulation

In linguistics, the term double articulation or duality of patterning refers to the way in which the stream of speech can be divided into meaningful signs, which can be further subdivided into meaningless elements...

) in interpretation between the language level and conceptual level. The goal of this separation is primarily to disambiguate the lexical representation of terms in a lexon (on the language level) into concept definitions (on the conceptual level), which are word senses taken from lexical resources such as WordNet

WordNet

WordNet is a lexical database for the English language. It groups English words into sets of synonyms called synsets, provides short, general definitions, and records the various semantic relations between these synonym sets...

. The meaning of the terms in a lexon is dependent on the context of elicitation .

For example, consider a term “capital”. If this term was elicited from a typewriter manual, it has a different meaning (read: concept definition) than when elicited from a book on marketing. The intuition that a context provides here is: a context is an abstract identifier that refers to implicit and tacit assumptions in a domain, and that maps a term to its intended meaning (i.e. concept identifier) within these assumptions.

Ontology Evolution

Ontologies naturally co-evolve with their communities of use. Therefore, in De Leenheer (2007) he identified a set of primitive operators for changing ontologies. We make sure these change primitives are conditional, which means that their applicability depends on pre- and post-conditions. Doing so, we guarantee that only valid structures can be built.

Context Dependency Types

De Leenheer and de Moor (2005) distinguished four key characteristics of context:

1. a context
   Context
   Context may refer to:* Context , the relevant constraints of the communicative situation that influence language use, language variation, and discourse summary...
   
    packages related knowledge: it defines part of the knowledge of a particular domain,
2. it disambiguates the lexical representation of concepts and relationships by distinguishing between language level and conceptual level,
3. it defines context dependencies between different ontological contexts and
4. contexts can be embedded or linked, in the sense that statements about contexts are themselves in context.

Based on this, they identified three different types of context dependencies within one ontology (intra-ontological) and between different ontologies (inter-ontological): articulation, application, and specialisation. One particular example in the sense of conceptual graph

Conceptual graph

Conceptual graphs are a formalism for knowledge representation. In the first published paper on CGs, John F. Sowa used them to represent the conceptual schemas used in database systems...

theory would be a specialisation dependency for which the dependency constraint is equivalent to the conditions for CG-specialisation

Context dependencies provide a better understanding of the whereabouts of knowledge elements and their inter-dependencies, and consequently make negotiation and application less vulnerable to ambiguity, hence more practical.

Further reading

• Mustafa Jarrar: "Towards Methodological Principles for Ontology Engineering". PhD Thesis. Vrije Universiteit Brussel. (May 2005)
• Mustafa Jarrar: "Towards the notion of gloss, and the adoption of linguistic resources in formal ontology engineering". In proceedings of the 15th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2006). Edinburgh, Scotland. Pages 497-503. ACM Press. ISBN 1595933239. May 2006.
• Mustafa Jarrar and Robert Meersman: "Ontology Engineering -The DOGMA Approach". Book Chapter (Chapter 3). In Advances in Web Semantics I. Volume LNCS 4891, Springer. 2008.
• Banerjee, J., Kim, W. Kim, H., and Korth., H. (1987) Semantics and implementation of schema evolution in object-oriented databases. Proc. ACM SIGMOD Conf. Management of Data, 16(3), pp. 311–322
• De Leenheer P, de Moor A (2005). Context-driven disambiguation in ontology elicitation. In P. Shvaiko and J. Euzenat (eds), Context and Ontologies: Theory, Practice, and Applications. Proc. of the 1st Context and Ontologies Workshop, AAAI/IAAI 2005, Pittsburgh, USA, pp 17–24
• De Leenheer P, de Moor A, Meersman R (2007). Context dependency management in ontology engineering: a formal approach. Journal on Data Semantics VIII, LNCS 4380, Springer, pp 26–56
• Jarrar, M., Demey, J., Meersman, R. (2003) On reusing conceptual data modeling for ontology engineering. Journal on Data Semantics 1(1):185–207
• Spyns P, Meersman R, Jarrar M (2002). Data modeling versus ontology engineering. SIGMOD Record, 31(4), pp 12–17