http://ontologydesignpatterns.org/wiki/Submissions:Classification scheme path enumeration model - to Taxonomy Boris Villaz´on-Terrazas1, Mari Carmen Sua´rez-Figueroa1, and Asuncio´n Ontology Engineering Group, Departamento de Inteligencia Artificial, Facultad de Non-Ontological Resource
Go´mez-P´erez1
This pattern for re-engineering non-ontological resources (PR-NOR) fits in the
Schema Re-engineering Category proposed by [
A non-ontological resource holds a classification scheme which follows the path enumeration model. A classification scheme is a rooted tree of concepts, in which each concept groups entities by some particular degree of similarity.
The semantics of the hierarchical relation between
parents and children concepts may vary
depending of the context. The path enumeration data
model [
Re-engineering a classification scheme, which follows the path enumeration model, to design a taxonomy. The semantics of the relation between parent and children items are subClassOf. There is not multi-inheritance nor cyclic relations.
The ontology generated will be based on the
taxonomy architectural pattern (AP-TX-01) [
Each category in the classification scheme is mapped to a class, and the semantics of the relationship between children and parent categories are mapped to subClassOf relations. Suppose that someone wants to build an ontology based on the International Standard Classification of Occupations (for European Union purposes) ISCO-88 (COM). This classification scheme follows the path enumeration data model. 1. Create the LEGISLATORS, SENIOR OFFICIALS
AND MANAGERS class. 1.1. Create the Legislators and senior officials class, and set up the subClassOf relation between the Legislators and senior officials class and the LEGISLATORS, SENIOR OFFICIALS AND
MANAGERS class. 1.2. Create the Corporate managers class, and set up the subClassOf relation between the Corporate managers class and the LEGISLATORS, SENIOR OFFICIALS AND
MANAGERS class. 2. Create the PROFESSIONALS class. 3. Create the Occupation class. 4. Set up the subClassOf relation between the
LEGISLATORS, SENIOR OFFICIALS AND MANAGERS class and the Occupation class. 5. Set up the subClassOf relation between the
PROFESSIONALS class and the Occupation class.
This pattern is related to the architectural pattern TX-AP-01 [
This pattern was applied to re-engineer the ISCO-88(COM)4, International Standard Classification of Occupations (for European Union purposes), into a Occupation Ontology5, within the context of the SEEMP project. This standard is a classification scheme which consists of 520 occupations. ISCO-88(COM) is modelled following the path enumeration data model. Because of the number of occupations of the ISCO-88(COM) standard, it was not practical to create the 4 Available at http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/ramon/ 5 The ontology is available at http://droz.dia.fi.upm.es/hrmontology/ ontology manually. Therefore, we created an ad-hoc wrapper, implemented in Java, that reads the data from the resource implementation and automatically creates the corresponding elements of the new ontology following the suggestion given by the pattern. 4
We have presented a pattern for transforming a classification scheme, which
is modelled following the path enumeration data model, into a taxonomy. The
pattern is included in a pool of patterns, which is a key element of our method
for re-engineering non-ontological resources into ontologies [
We plan to develop software libraries within a framework that implement the transformation process suggested by the pattern. Moreover, we will include external resources to improve the quality of the resultant ontologies. Finally, we need to calculate how much effort do we save re-engineering classification schemes using patterns compared with re-engineering classification schemes without them. Acknowledgments. This work has been partially supported by the European Comission projects NeOn(FP6-027595) and SEEMP(FP6-027347), as well as by an R+D grant from the UPM.