Abstract
The listing and automatic detection of ontology pitfalls are crucial in ontology engineering. Existing work mainly focused on detecting pitfalls in stand-alone ontologies. Here, we introduce a new categorization of ontology pitfalls: stand-alone ontology pitfalls, pitfalls in versioned ontologies and, pitfalls in ontology networks. We investigate pitfalls in a situation of ontology co-evolution and we provide a systematic categorization of the different cases that could occur during the co-evolution process over two ontology portals: the Linked Open Vocabulary and BioPortal. We also identify 9 candidate pitfalls that may affect versioned ontologies or ontology networks. We evaluate the importance and potential impact of the candidate pitfalls by means of a web-based survey we conducted in the semantic web community. Participants agreed that listing and investigating ontology pitfalls can effectively enhance the quality of ontologies and affect positively the use of ontologies. Moreover, the participants substantially agreed with the new categorization we proposed. We conclude by providing a set of recommendations to avoid or solve the different pitfalls we identified.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
https://www.w3.org/TR/owl2-syntax/, Sect. 3.4.
- 6.
Last check January 2020, can be found here: http://oops.linkeddata.es/catalogue.jsp.
- 7.
- 8.
A RDF term is generally defined as: \(IRI \cup Blank nodes \cup Literals\). In this research we take into consideration only the IRIs.
- 9.
The experiments with full results can be found at: https://github.com/OmarAlqawasmeh/coEvolutionTermsExtraction.
- 10.
Last counted on January 2020.
- 11.
The co-evolution cases of LOV and BioPortal are inside the resources folder at https://github.com/OmarAlqawasmeh/coEvolutionTermsExtraction.
- 12.
More details about the extensions managing of schema.org can be found at: https://schema.org/docs/extension.html.
- 13.
Namespace of Schema.org is http://schema.org/.
- 14.
Some examples of discarded namespaces: https://health-lifesci.schema.org/, https://pending.schema.org/, https://meta.schema.org/.
- 15.
https://www.w3.org/TR/owl2-syntax/, Sects. 3.1 and 3.3.
- 16.
Cool URIs can be found at: https://www.w3.org/TR/cooluris/.
- 17.
The survey can be found at: http://bit.ly/36JQfgO.
- 18.
Raw results can be found at: http://bit.ly/2RztHKq.
- 19.
The source code found in resources/SurveyExperiments at https://github.com/OmarAlqawasmeh/coEvolutionTermsExtraction.
- 20.
P1. Ontology is not accessible at its IRI
P2. Importing an ontology using a non persistent IRI or the IRI of a representation
P3. Importing an inconsistent ontology
P4. Only the latest version of the ontology is available online
P5. Importing an ontology series IRI instead of an ontology version IRI
P6. Ontology series IRI is the same as the ontology version IRI
P7. Term is moved from one ontology module to another with different IRI
P8. Namespace hijacking
P9. The IRI of a term contains a file extension.
- 21.
- 22.
Pifall number 3 from http://oops.linkeddata.es/catalogue.jsp.
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Acknowledgment
The authors would like to thank María Poveda (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid) for her suggestions and comments during the creation of the candidate pitfalls. Additionally, the authors would also like to thank the 27 anonymous participants for their valuable contribution to the experimental evaluation of the candidate pitfalls.
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Qawasmeh, O., Lefrançois, M., Zimmermann, A., Maret, P. (2020). Pitfalls in Networked and Versioned Ontologies. In: Fred, A., Salgado, A., Aveiro, D., Dietz, J., Bernardino, J., Filipe, J. (eds) Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management. IC3K 2019. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1297. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66196-0_9
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