Semantic and linked-data technologies are currently used by several cultural heritage institutions to make their content available through the Web. Although these technologies are heavily oriented towards data reuse and integration, one clear benefit highlighted by recent literature is the enhancement of human cultural consumption and user experience through the development of novel cultural end-user applications like Online Public Access Catalogues (OPACs). However, to the best of our knowledge, studies into the impact of these technologies on end-user applications are scarce. In order to address this lack, we report the results of two within-group user-centred studies of two online bibliographic systems in a realistic setting — using a widely deployed OPAC and its counterpart linked-data based system, datos.bne.es. The results of our first within-group study show that users of the system based on linked data required significantly less time and visited fewer pages to complete a typical search and retrieval activity. Additionally, the results of our user satisfaction tests also provided significantly better results for this new system. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that semantic technologies applied to library catalogues provide an enhancement that helps satisfy users’ information needs.

Abstract As the interest of the Semantic Web and computational linguistics communities in linguistic linked data (LLD) keeps increasing and the number of contributions that dwell on LLD rapidly grows, scholars (and linguists in particular) interested in the development of LLD resources sometimes find it difficult to determine which mechanism is suitable for their needs and which challenges have already been addressed. This review seeks to present the state of the art on the models, ontologies and their extensions to represent language resources as LLD by focusing on the nature of the linguistic content they aim to encode. Four basic groups of models are distinguished in this work: models to represent the main elements of lexical resources (group 1), vocabularies developed as extensions to models in group 1 and ontologies that provide more granularity on specific levels of linguistic analysis (group 2), catalogues of linguistic data categories (group 3) and other models such as corpora models or service-oriented ones (group 4). Contributions encompassed in these four groups are described, highlighting their reuse by the community and the modelling challenges that are still to be faced.

Terminologies in the biomedical field are one of the main resources used in the clinical practice. Keeping them up-to-date to meet real-world use cases is a critical operation that even in the case of well maintained terminologies such as SNOMED-CT involves much effort from domain experts. Pharmacological products or drugs are constantly being approved and made available in the market and their clinical information should be also updated in terminologies. Each new drug is provided with its Summary of Product Characteristics (SPC), a document in natural language that contains its essential information.

Knowledge Graphs (KG) are becoming core components of most artificial intelligence applications. Linked Data, as a method of publishing KGs, allows applications to traverse within, and even out of, the graph thanks to global dereferenceable identifiers denoting entities, in the form of IRIs. However, as we show in this work, after analyzing several popular datasets (namely DBpedia, LOD Cache, and Web Data Commons JSON-LD data) many entities are being represented using literal strings where IRIs should be used, diminishing the advantages of using Linked Data. To remedy this, we propose an approach for identifying such strings and replacing them with their corresponding entity IRIs. The proposed approach is based on identifying relations between entities based on both ontological axioms as well as data profiling information and converting strings to entity IRIs based on the types of entities linked by each relation. Our approach showed 98% recall and 76% precision in identifying such strings and 97% precision in converting them to their corresponding IRI in the considered KG. Further, we analyzed how the connectivity of the KG is increased when new relevant links are added to the entities as a result of our method. Our experiments on a subset of the Spanish DBpedia data show that it could add 25% more links to the KG and improve the overall connectivity by 17%.

A multi-lingual term bank of copyright-related terms has been published connecting WIPO definitions, IATE terms and definitions from Creative Commons licenses. These terms have been hierarchically arranged, spanning multiple languages and targeting different jurisdictions. The term bank has been published as a TBX dump file and is publicly accessible as linked data. Models for the RDF data structure are based on Lemon and W3C Recommendations. The term bank has been used to annotate common licenses in the RDFLicense dataset.

Privacy protection in published data sets is of crucial importance, and anonymisation is one well-known technique for privacy protection that has been successfully used in practice.However, existing anonymisation frameworks have in mind specific data structures (i.e., tabular data) and, because of this, these frameworks are difficult to apply in the case of RDF data.This paper presents an RDF anonymisation framework that has been developed to address the particularities of the RDF specification.Such framework includes an anonymisation model for RDF data, a set of anonymisation operations for the implementation of such model, and a metric for measuring precision and distortion of anonymised RDF data.Furthermore, this paper presents a use case of the proposed RDF anonymisation framework.

This paper describes a dataset of licenses expressed as RDF. The most important rights and conditions present in licenses for software, data and general works are expressed with the Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) 2.0 vocabulary and extensions thereof. The dataset contains licenses identified by a dereferenceable URI, which are served with content negotiation providing a double representation for humans and machines alike. This feature enables a generalized machine-to-machine commerce if generally adopted.

This paper presents two contributions to the field of Ontology Evaluation. First, a live catalogue of pitfalls that extends previous works on modeling errors with new pitfalls resulting from an empirical analysis of over 693 ontologies. Such a catalogue classifies pitfalls according to the Structural, Functional and Usability-Profiling dimensions. For each pitfall, we incorporate the value of its importance level (critical, important and minor) and the number of ontologies where each pitfall has been detected. Second, OOPS! (OntOlogy Pitfall Scanner!), a tool for detecting pitfalls in ontologies and targeted at newcomers and domain experts unfamiliar with description logics and ontology implementation languages. The tool operates independently of any ontology development platform and is available online. The evaluation of the system is provided both through a survey of users' satisfaction and worldwide usage statistics. In addition, the system is also compared with existing ontology evaluation tools in terms of coverage of pitfalls detected.

Conceptual modeling is a complex task that requires domain specific knowledge as well as a good command of modeling techniques. In this paper we propose an approach that aims to capture relevant knowledge from an online pool of conceptual models. This knowledge is brought to the user in order to assist the construction of new conceptual models. With our method, relevant feedback is generated based on knowledge extracted from the pool of models. Such feedback, tailored to the current modeling process of the user, allows the model to be improved based on shared knowledge.

Abstract This paper presents a novel approach to ontology localization with the objective of obtaining multilingual ontologies. Within the ontology development process, ontology localization has been defined as the activity of adapting an ontology to a concrete linguistic and cultural community. Depending on the ontology layers – terminological and/or conceptual – involved in the ontology localization activity, three heterogeneous multilingual ontology metamodels have been identified, of which we propose one of them. Our proposal consists in associating the ontology metamodel to an external model for representing and structuring lexical and terminological data in different natural languages. Our model has been called Linguistic Information Repository (LIR). The main advantages of this modelling modality rely on its flexibility by allowing (1) the enrichment of any ontology element with as much linguistic information as needed by the final application, and (2) the establishment of links among linguistic elements within and across different natural languages. The LIR model has been designed as an ontology of linguistic elements and is currently available in Web Ontology Language (OWL). The set of lexical and terminological data that it provides to ontology elements enables the localization of any ontology to a certain linguistic and cultural universe. The LIR has been evaluated against the multilingual requirements of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in the framework of the NeOn project. It has proven to solve multilingual representation problems related to the establishment of well-defined relations among lexicalizations within and across languages, as well as conceptualization mismatches among different languages. Finally, we present an extension to the Ontology Metadata Vocabulary, the so-called LexOMV, with the aim of reporting on multilinguality at the ontology metadata level. By adding this contribution to the LIR model, we account for multilinguality at the three levels of an ontology: data level, knowledge representation level and metadata level.

In this paper we present the process that has been followed for the development of an application that makes use of several heterogeneous Spanish public datasets that are related to three themes of INSPIRE Directive, specifically Administrative Units, Hydrography, and Statistical Units. Our application aims at analysing existing relations between the Spanish coastal area and different statistical variables such as population, unemployment, dwelling, industry, and building trade. Besides providing methodological guidelines for the generation, publishing and exploitation of Linked Data from such datasets, we provide an important innovation with respect to other similar processes followed in other initiatives by dealing with the geometrical information of features.

To speed up the ontology development process, ontology developers are reusing all available ontological and non-ontological resources, such as classification schemes, thesauri, lexicons, and so forth, that have already reached some consensus. Non-ontological resources are highly heterogeneous in their data model and storage system (or implementation). The reuse of these non-ontological resources involves their re-engineering into ontologies. This paper presents a method for re-engineering non-ontological resources into ontologies. The method is based on so-called re-engineering patterns, which define a procedure that transforms the non-ontological resource components into ontology representational primitives using WordNet for making explicit the relations among the non-ontological resource terms. The paper also provides the description of NOR2O, a software library that implements the transformations suggested by the patterns. Finally, it depicts an evaluation of the method, patterns, and software library proposed.

International organizations (e.g., FAO, WHO, etc.) are increasingly expressing the need for multilingual ontologies for different purposes, e.g., ontology-based multilingual machine translation, multilingual information retrieval. However, most of the ontologies built so far have mainly English or another natural language as basis. Since multilingual ontology building is a very expensive and time-consuming undertaking, we propose methods for guiding users in the localization of ontologies, and provide tools for supporting the process. The main contributions of this paper are: i) the description of a generic Ontology Localization Activity and a methodology for guiding in the localization of ontologies; ii) the description of a tool built according to the guidelines proposed for an automatic localization of ontologies; and iii) a set of experiments used to evaluate the methodological and technological aspects of the Ontology Localization Activity.

In this poster, we present a set of nine scenarios, identified in the NeOn Methodology, for building ontology networks.

Abstract We describe the results of the RDF(S) activity within the Open Grid Forum ( http://www.ogf.org ) (OGF) Database Access and Integration Services (DAIS) Working Group ( http://forge.gridforum.org/projects/dais‐wg ) whose objective is to develop standard service‐based grid access mechanisms for data expressed in RDF and RDF Schema. We produce two specifications, focused on the provision of SPARQL querying capabilities for accessing RDF data and a set of RDF Schema ontology handling primitives for creating, retrieving, updating, and deleting RDF data. In this paper we present a set of use cases that justify this work and an overview of these specifications, which will enter in editorial process at OGF25. We conclude by outlining the future work that will be made in the context of this standardization process. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Interoperability among different development tools is not a straightforward task since ontology editors rely on specific internal knowledge models which are translated into common formats such as RDF(S). This paper addresses the urgent need for interoperability by providing an exhaustive set of benchmark suites for evaluating RDF(S) import, export and interoperability. It also demonstrates, in an extensive field study, the state-of-the-art of interoperability among six Semantic Web tools. From this field study we have compiled a comprehensive set of practices that may serve as recommendations for Semantic Web tool developers and ontology engineers.

Mappings usually relate two similar knowledge representations. Thus, we can find many examples of mappings amid thesauri, databases, ontologies (domain ontologies, top-level and domain ontologies, PSM (Problem Solving Method) and domain ontologies, linguistic and domain ontologies); additionally, we can frequently find systems with mappings that relate two different knowledge representations, for instance, databases and ontologies. All these mappings are operationally different, and are also named differently (mappings, correspondences, semantic bridges, transformations, semantic relations, functions, conversions, domain-PSM relations), but is there a single definition for these concepts? Can we find common characteristics? This paper analyzes the existing definitions and representation of the term “mapping” (and related terms) in the ontology world and its semantic neighborhood and proposes a new definition and representation of “mapping” for the Semantic Web field.

This paper presents our experience in reusing mereology ontologies in a Pharmaceutical Product ontology, an ontology built by the EU NeOn project. It shows a set of mereology ontologies implemented in different machine interpretable languages and analyzes them according to the different types of mereology identified by Varzi. Then, it describes the specifications of mereology modeling necessities for Pharmaceutical Product. Finally, it presents the ontology which fits best with the specifications. One of the results of this work is a procedure to reuse general (also called common) ontologies.

The use of a Semantic Grid architecture can ease the deployment of complex applications, in which several organizations are involved and where resources of diverse nature (data and computing elements) are shared. This is the situation in the Space domain, with a strong demand of computational resources inscribed in an extensive and heterogeneous network of facilities and institutions. This paper presents the S-OGSA architecture, defined in the Ontogrid project, as applied into a scenario for the overall monitoring and data analysis in a Satellite Mission currently in nominal operations. Flexibility, scalability, interoperability and use of a common framework for data sharing are the main advantages of a Semantic Grid implementation in Complex and dataintensive systems.

A Semantic Web portal is a Web application that offers information and services related to a specific domain, and that has been developed with Semantic Web technology. For the time being, the main difference with respect to a traditional Web portal is based on technological aspects: traditional Web portals are based on standard Web technology (HTML, XML, servlets, JSPs, etc.); semantic portals are based on that technology plus the use of Semantic Web languages like RDF, RDF Schema and OWL. This paper describes a unifying architecture for both types of portals, based on the MVC paradigm, which is implemented in the ODESeW framework. ODESeW has been used successfully in the development of a set of portals for the management of European R&D projects and for the management of research groups.

We describe the architecture of the ODESeW 2.0 Semantic Web application development platform, which has been used to generate the internal and external Web sites of several R&D projects.

In this paper, we describe SGSDesigner, the ODESGS Environment user interface. ODESGS Environment (the realization of the ODESGS Framework [1]) is an environment for supporting both a) the annotation of pre-existing Grid Services (GSs) and b) the design of new complex Semantic Grid Services (SGSs) in a (semi) automatic way.

In this paper, we present EgoIR, an approach for retrieving legal information based on ontologies; this approach has been developed with Legal Ontologies to be deployed within the e-government context.

In this paper, we present Oyster, a Peer-to-Peer system for exchanging ontology metadata among communities in the Semantic Web. Oyster exploits semantic web techniques in data representation, query formulation and query result presentation to provide an online solution for sharing ontologies, thus assisting researchers in re-using existing ontologies.

In this poster, we describe a framework composed of the R 2O mapping language and the ODEMapster processor to upgrade relational legacy data to the Semantic Web. The framework is based on the declarative description of mappings between relational and ontology elements and the exploitation of such mapping descriptions by a generic processor capable of performing both massive and query driven data upgrade.

The convergence of the Semantic Web and Grid technologies has resulted in the Semantic Grid. The Semantic Grid should be service-oriented, as the Grid is, so the formal description of Grid Services (GS) turns to be a crucial issue. In this paper we present our approach for this issue. ODESGS Framework will enable the annotation of all the aspects of a GS and the design, discovery and composition Semantic Grid Services (SGS).

In this paper we present a model for building ontology translation systems between ontology languages and/or ontology tools, where translation decisions are defined at four different layers: lexical, syntax, semantic, and pragmatic. This layered approach provides a major contribution to the current state of the art in ontology translation, since it makes ontology translation systems easier to build and understand and, consequently, to maintain and reuse. As part of this model, we propose a method that guides in the process of developing ontology translation systems according to this approach. The method identifies four main activities: feasibility study, analysis of source, and target formats, design, and implementation of the translation system, with their decomposition in tasks, and recommends the techniques to be used inside each of them.

In the last years, the development of ontology-based applications has increased considerably, mainly related to the semantic web. Users currently looking for ontologies in order to incorporate them into their systems, just use their experience and intuition. This makes it difficult for them to justify their choices. Mainly, this is due to the lack of methods that help the user to determine which are the most appropriate ontologies for the new system. To solve this deficiency, the present work proposes a method, ONTOMETRIC, which allows the users to measure the suitability of existing ontologies, regarding the requirements of their systems.

To select a software component from several similar candidates is a complex task, since each project pursues different objectives. We intend to use the Analytic Hierarchy Process in the taking of multicriteria decisions for software component reuse. This method is called BAREMO. It will help the software engineer to make estimations which will enable him/her to choose the appropriate component. The article presents a case study of the application of the method, where a project manager assesses a certain software component in order to consider its reuse in the domain of image processing.

This paper presents WebODE as a workbench for ontological engineering that not only allows the collaborative edition of ontologies at the knowledge level, but also provides a scalable architecture for the development of other ontology development tools and ontology-based applications. First, we will describe the knowledge model of WebODE, which has been mainly extracted and improved from the reference model of METHONTOLOGY's intermediate representations. Later, we will present its architecture, together with the main functionalities of the WebODE ontology editor, such as its import/export service, translation services, ontology browser, inference engine and axiom generator, and some services that have been integrated in the workbench: WebPicker, OntoMerge and the OntoCatalogue.

The evaluation of ontologies is an emerging field. At present, there is an absence of a deep core of preliminary ideas and guidelines for evaluating ontologies. This paper presents a brief summary of previous work done on evaluating ontologies and the criteria (consistency, completeness, conciseness, expandability, and sensitiveness) used to evaluate and to assess ontologies. It also addresses the possible types of errors made when domain knowledge is structured in taxonomies in an ontology and in knowledge bases: circularity errors, exhaustive and nonexhaustive class partition errors, redundancy errors, grammatical errors, semantic errors, and incompleteness errors. It also describes the process followed to evaluate the standard-units ontology already published at the Ontology Server. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.