Ontology comprehension

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Ontologies are conceptual models of a domain of discourse and are used in a numberof applications to model a field of knowledge. For example, SNOMED, an ontologyof medical terminology, is widely used among medical professionals. Commercialontologies, such as SNOMED, can have hundreds of thousands of concepts. Peoplewho want to use these ontologies need an understanding thereof, but the sheermagnitude of these ontologies hampers comprehension. It was within this contextthat the need arose for software tools that facilitate the understanding of ontologies.Given this background, our aim is to investigate a new area within the field ofontologies, namely, ontology comprehension. We make a contribution to it bydeveloping an ontology comprehension framework and writing a software tool of ourown. This software tool, PathViz, helps users to understand how different conceptsin an ontology are related to each other and what effect entailments have on theway concepts in an ontology relate to each other. The ontology comprehensionframework, PathViz and the reasoning measurement instruments were found usefulfor ontology comprehension by participants at an ontology workshop.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University