We present ontologydesignpatterns.org (ODP), a semantic web portal based on semantic wiki technology, that supports the community around best practices of ontology design. ODP provides services for ontology design pattern evaluation, training on ontology design, and a repository of reusable OWL ontologies. We also present Evaluation WikiFlow, a (Semantic) MediaWiki extension that we have developed starting from the ODP requirement for pattern evaluation and certification support.
Ontologydesignpatterns.org (ODP) is a semantic web portal dedicated to ontology design best practices for the semantic web, with particular focus on ontology design patterns (OPs). ODP is targeted at users who are interested in best practices for ontology design and ontology engineering, and OPs are reusable solutions to recurrent modeling problems. As such, they are a preferential route for designing high-quality ontologies. In [16], OPs are classified into different types: logical, content, presentation, correspondence, etc. Currently, ODP supports the lifecycle of Content ontology design patterns (CPs) (solutions to content modeling problems, e.g for time, space, biological sequencing, geographic areas, invoicing, etc.). Being integrated with specific modeling problems, CPs are ideally reusable components for building ontologies that are valid with reference to their task and domain, and due to their simplicity, they can be easily exploited as reference vocabularies for publishing linked data on the web. Currently, ODP is under improvement for supporting the lifecycle of other OP types, and it is also used as a resource for enhancing collaborative ontology design with the NeOn Toolkit1, e.g. by matching, specializing, and composing CPs in specific ontology projects [17]. In this paper we present two contributions.
The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 describes ODP organization and main functionalities; Section 3 explains and shows how CPs are presented within ODP: Section 4 depicts Evaluation WikiFlow, and Section 5 reports on some related work. Finally, Section 6 concludes and discusses further developments of this work. 2
According to the functionality that we have implemented so far, and depicted in Figure 1, ODP features different areas and types of users. Currently, the web portal is organized into the following areas: Community. This area is meant to receive ODP users’ contributions and discussions. It includes a facility for posting modeling issues to the aim of sharing experiences and adopted solutions with the community.
Proposals. This is the area where ODP users can propose OPs2. It includes a catalogue of all proposed CPs. There are two alternative procedures for proposing a pattern, both are accessible through the Propose a Content OP functionality.
– the user chooses a name for the CP and is guided by a simple form that, once filled and saved, is posted as a new CP proposal; – the user uploads the owl file of the CP, and the system automatically fills the CP form, that once accepted by the user is posted as a CP proposal. The form can be further edited by the user by the edit with form functionality. In order to exploit this facility at its best, the owl file must be annotated in terms of rdfs:label, 2 Currently, only CP proposals are supported.
rdfs:comment, and annotation properties defined by the CP annotation schema3.
All these annotation properties are mapped to semantic relations into ODP.
The proposed OPs are expected to come from practical and successful experiences of ontology development. All proposed patterns belong to the ODP namespace named Submissions.
Reviews. This area collects and publishes the reviews of proposed CPs. Proposed CPs can be reviewed by all registered users i.e. open reviews. However, they are eventually reviewed by at least two members of the Quality Committee, formed by ontology experts i.e. QC reviews. The aim of reviews is twofold: on one hand, they provide ODP users with explicit rationales behind the evaluation of specific domain solutions. On the other hand, reviews provide the author of a certain CP with guidelines for fixing possible problems in order to get the CP certified.
Open reviews are extremely useful to Quality Committee members while formulating their review, and also for identifying new Quality Committee members from the community.
Catalogue. This is the official CP catalogue. This area collects all CPs that are certified by the ODP Quality Committee. The only difference between certified and proposed CPs is that the formers are guaranteed to be fully described (with regard to ODP specification)4, validated by the ODP Quality Committee, and always associated with a reusable OWL implementation available for download that has a stable namespace. Training. This area collects tutorials, publications, and sample modeling exercises. Feedback. This is the area where ODP users can post feedback entries. Typically, feedback entries identify issues to be addressed in order to improve ODP. The editorial board and the ODP core developers treat such feedback as input/suggestions for raising new development and/or maintenance requirements.
Domain. This page lists all domains that have been defined by ODP users, and allows them to create new ones. Each CP or Modeling Issue is associated with a domain e.g. Organization, Business, Health, Music, etc., by the semantic property domain. This semantic property is extremely useful for users who are looking for CPs for a certain domain of knowledge. In fact, they can query ODP about all CPs addressing a certain domain.
Read and write access to ODP areas is handled by a policy based on five different types of users. Types of users are: AnonymousUser, ODPUser, EBMember, QCMember, Administrator.
– Anonymous users (AnonymousUser). They have read-only access to the whole portal, and can request an account. 3 http://ontologydesignpatterns.org/schemas/cpannotationschema.owl 4 See also the cp annotation schema: http://www.ontologydesignpatterns.org/schemas/cpannotationschema.owl – ODP users (ODPUser). This user type represents everybody who has registered to ODP through the account request page, and hence it is part of the ODP Community. Such users can create and/or edit articles in the Community area, post modeling issues, create and/or edit pages about domains, submit proposals, post feedback entries, make open reviews about proposals, and participate in the discussions (through the discussion page). – Editorial board (EBMember). Users in this group answer feedback, propose and contribute to content improvement through a page dedicated to development tasks5. The Feedback area is used by editorial board members in order to identify possible development tasks. The development task page is directly used by core developers, and the editorial board members are entitled to manage task priority. – Quality committee members (QCMember). These users are entitled to posting QC reviews about proposals. Certification of CP that are published in the official catalogue is based on QC reviews, and they are handled in a peer-reviewing like approach. The QC evaluation workflow is managed by the Evaluation WikiFlow extension presented in Section 4. – Administrators (Administrator). Users in this group manage account creation,
ODP technical issues and upgrades. 3
ODP software is based on Media Wiki6, Semantic Media Wiki (SMW)7, Semantic Forms (SF)8, and other extensions 9. We have exploited such extensions’ features in order to semantically represent as more knowledge as possible about the ontology design patterns. All wiki articles are assigned with a category, and can be related each others through semantic relations. The core of ODP is made of articles that represent ontology design patterns (currently only CPs). According to [16] we have defined a set of semantic properties that comply to the CP annotation schema10. They allow us to specify useful semantic information about CPs, and have guided us as well in defining the visualization template of CP pages.
Consider for example Figure 2. It depicts the ODP page of the CP named situation, which is in the catalogue of proposals11. Under the diagrammatic representation of the CP (which is a UML class diagram automatically obtained by Top Braid Composer12) on the center-right side of the page there is a box containing CP properties. They include: the person who submitted the proposal; the name of the CP; its intent, consequences, and typically associated competency questions; relations to other CPs, such as its components, its specializing CPs, and CPs that are specialized by it; the URL of 5 http://ontologydesignpatterns.org/index.php/Odp:Development 6 http://www.mediawiki.org 7 http://www.semantic-mediawiki.org 8 http://www.mediawiki.org/Extension:SemanticForm 9 The full list of the extensions can be found at http://ontologydesignpatterns.org/index.php/Special:Version 10 http://www.ontologydesignpatterns.org/schemas/cpannotationschema.owl 11 http://ontologydesignpatterns.org/index.php/Submissions:Situation 12 http://www.topquadrant.com/topbraid/composer/index.html the downloadable OWL building block, the source from which it has been extracted, and so on. On the center-left side of the page, all ontology elements defined in the CP are listed and described. Furthermore, each of them has its own wiki article of category OntologyElement. On the bottom of the page, there are links to examples of scenarios modeled by using the CP, such examples includes a UML object diagram, a natural language description, and a link to the OWL file that implements it.
Finally, on the very bottom of the page, there are links to possible reviews of the patterns.
Next section describes Evaluation WikiFlow, a SMW extension that is able to support workflows for the evaluation of wiki articles. 4
Evaluation WikiFlow has been released in alpha version as open source software and can be downloaded from the MediaWiki wiki site13. The reader can test it on ODP, where it is associated to ProposedCP articles.
Evaluation WikiFlow is designed in order to store a semantic representation of the evaluation history of an article. This feature is motivated by the goal of semantically representing the rationales behind an evaluation so as to identify recurrent mistakes and good practices (of ontology design in the case of ODP).
Evaluation WikiFlow is substantiated by a tab, labelled as evaluation, which is added on top of the wiki page, as shown in Figure 3. Evaluation WikiFlow’s features can be described from two perspectives: configuration and functionality. Configuration features include the following ones.
This feature allows users to activate the evaluation tab and its functionalities (see later in this section) for a set of categories defined by the ontology behind the wiki.
E.g. currently ODP activates it for the ProposedCP category.
lows users to define the review schema associated with the correspondent semantic form.
egories. This feature allows users to associate different categories (or sets of categories) with semantic forms having different review schemas E.g. in ODP, Logical OPs will be reviewed by using a form different from the one used for reviewing CPs.
Access rights configuration. Evaluation WikiFlow adds five new permissions to the existing ones. They can be configured in order to allow/prevent users to certify articles, and to perform the following actions on reviews: view, ask for, assign, and make. E.g. ODP QCMember users have the rights for making a review, while every ODPUser can ask for a review.
From the functionality side, Evaluation WikiFlow provides the following features, accessible from the evaluation tab (see Figure 3). 13 at http://www.mediawiki.org/Extensions:EvalWF
Ask for Review. This functionality allows users to ask for a review of the current article. Once this action has been performed, the article is automatically assigned to the category WaitingForReview that represents the current state of the article. Assign Review. This functionality allows users to commit another user with the task of reviewing an article. E.g. the ODP EBMember users are allowed to perform this action in order to assign the reviewing of a CP proposal to some QCMember users. Make Review. By performing this action, the reviewer faces a review form and can post a review. A new article containing the review is created and named by concatenating the user name of the reviewer and the name of the article under evaluation. If the article under evaluation has the WaitingForReview category, this is updated by removing it. E.g. ODP QCMember users can perform this action in ODP. A possible future enhancement of this feature would be to make the system aware of additional status of an article associated to an equal number of actions e.g., when an article has received all expected reviews it enters a WaitingForRevision status and th system asks the authors to revise the article according to all reviews. Certify. This functionality allows users to certify an article. Once an article is certified it is freezed i.e. it cannot be modified anymore. Furthermore, the evaluation tab of the article reports its evaluation history (see next bullet). The user has the possibility to automatically create a copy of the article. The copy will have a completely separated lifecycle from the previous one e.g. a copy of a certified CP proposal is created in the ODP Catalogue namespace and can be modified in order to indicate a persistent identifier for the building block, etc.
Semantic report of evaluation history. The evaluation tab of an article is dynamically updated with its evaluation history. Each review of the article is associated with two article’s versions: the one under evaluation and the possible updated version of the article that takes into account the review. The editor of the article can express the association “takes into account” between the revised article and the addressed review, by means of a “one click” functionality. The semantic report of the evaluation history exploits the MediaWiki versioning system. In the context of ODP, our aim is to use the evaluation history as a source for analyzing the rationales behind the evaluation of patterns as well as for extracting good practices and common mistakes e.g. anti-patterns [17] in ontology design.
In order to exemplify the Evaluation WikiFlow extension, we show (see Figure 4) its instantiation in the ODP case. The evaluation tab is used in order to support the certification process of patterns. After posting a CP proposal, an ODP user can submit it to the certification process by asking a review i.e. by clicking in the ask for review button in the evaluation tab. The CP proposal is added to the list of CPs that are waiting for reviews (the category WaitingForReview is assigned to the CP). Such list is handled by the editorial board.
An EBMember user eventually assigns the reviewing task to at least two QCMember users. When a review is created, the category of the CP proposal is updated i.e., WaitingForReview is removed from the list of the CP’s categories, and a link to the review is added in the CP proposal page.
The author of the CP can modify it in order to address the review issues. Once the
author believes that a certain version of the CP addresses one or more reviews, (s)he can
associate such version to them with the relation takesIntoAccountReviews14.
This process is iterated until reviewers decide agree on the certification of the CP.
Certified CPs are copied in the official catalogue i.e the Catalogue namespace.
In the past few years, there has been lots of research and development effort on good
practices of web ontology design. Literature spans from reports of the W3C OEP task
force [15, 12], to methodology- and ontology design patterns-oriented books and
scientific papers e.g., [16, 14]. Additionally, repositories of reusable components are
available on the web15. In the context of Semantic Web research and applications, ontology
14 This is a “one click” operation.
15 E.g. http://odps.sourceforge.net/
design patterns (OPs) are now a hot topic. Their notion has been introduced by [
ODP is about ontology design patterns in the sense of [
In this paper, we have described ontologydesignpatterns.org (ODP), a semantic web
portal supporting the community around best practices of ontology design for the
Semantic Web, with particular focus on ontology design patterns (OPs). Starting from
ODP requirements of supporting the certification process of patterns, we have
developed a SMW extension for supporting the process of wiki articles’ evaluation, also
presented here and named Evaluation WikiFlow. We have planned a user-based
evaluation by monitoring the ODP community activity. ODP ongoing and planned work
includes:
– support for new types of ontology design patterns, according to the ontology pattern
classification described in [16];
– a keyword-based search service based on Watson [20];
– the ODP repository APIs that will allow to query and select the ODP repository of
patterns;
– an OWL/RDF export service;
– augmenting CPs by means of Linking Open Data17;
– an open rating system for open reviews based on [
For additional information on ongoing work on ODP, the reader can refer to the development task page18.
Acknowledgments We are grateful to the members of the NeOn consortium, who contributed to the NeOn vision being funded by the European Commission 6th IST Framework Programme 19. 18 http://ontologydesignpatterns.org/index.php/Odp:Development 19 http://www.neon-project.org 12. Natasha Noy and Alan Rector. Defining N-ary Relations on the Semantic Web: Use With Individuals. Technical report, W3C, 2005. http://www.w3.org/TR/swbp-n-aryRelations/ (2004). 13. D. Oberle. Semantic Management of Middleware, volume I of The Semantic Web and Beyond. Springer, New York, FEB 2006. 14. H. Pinto, S. Staab, and C. Tempich. Diligent: Towards a fine-grained methodology for distributed, loosely-controlled and evolving engineering of ontologies. In Proceedings of the 16th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2004), Valencia, Spain, 2004. 15. S. W. B. Practices and D. W. Group. Task force on ontology engineering patterns. description of work, archives, w3c notes and recommendations. http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/BestPractices/OEP/, 2004. 16. V. Presutti and A. Gangemi. Content Ontology Design Patterns as Practical Building Blocks for Web Ontologies. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER 2008), Berlin, 2008. Springer. 17. V. Presutti, A. Gangemi, S. David, G. Aguado de Cea, M. Suarez-Figueroa, E. MontielPonsoda, and M. Poveda. Library of design patterns for collaborative development of networked ontologies. Deliverable D2.5.1, NeOn project, 2008. 18. A. Rector and J. Rogers. Patterns, properties and minimizing commitment: Reconstruction of the galen upper ontology in owl. In A. Gangemi and S. Borgo, editors, Proceedings of the EKAW*04 Workshop on Core Ontologies in Ontology Engineering. CEUR, 2004. 19. V. Svatek. Design patterns for semantic web ontologies: Motivation and discussion. In
Proceedings of the 7th Conference on Business Information Systems, Poznan, 2004. 20. Watson: Semantic web gateway. http://watson.kmi.open.ac.uk/.