Aldo Gangemi

dolce, the first top-level (foundational) ontology to be axiomatized, has remained stable for twenty years and today is broadly used in a variety of domains. dolce is inspired by cognitive and linguistic considerations and aims to model a commonsense view of reality, like the one human beings exploit in everyday life in areas as diverse as socio-technical systems, manufacturing, financial transactions and cultural heritage. dolce clearly lists the ontological choices it is based upon, relies on philosophical principles, is richly formalized, and is built according to well-established ontological methodologies, e.g. OntoClean. Because of these features, it has inspired most of the existing top-level ontologies and has been used to develop or improve standards and public domain resources (e.g. CIDOC CRM, DBpedia and WordNet). Being a foundational ontology, dolce is not directly concerned with domain knowledge. Its purpose is to provide the general categories and relations needed to gi...

ScholarlyData is the reference linked dataset of the Semantic Web community about papers, people, organisations, and events related to its academic conferences. In this paper we present an extension of such a linked dataset and its associated ontology (i.e. the conference ontology) in order to represent research impact indicators. The latter includes both traditional (e.g. citation count) and alternative indicators (e.g. altmetrics).

Abstract. The increasing development of legal ontologies seems to offer inter-esting solutions to legal knowledge formalization, which in past experiences lead to a limited exploitation of legal expert systems for practical use. The pa-per describes how a constructive approach to ...

Ontology Design Patterns (ODPs) have become an established and recognised practice for guaranteeing good quality ontology engineering. There are several ODP repositories where ODPs are shared as well as ontology design methodologies recommending their reuse. Performing rigorous testing is recommended as well for supporting ontology maintenance and validating the resulting resource against its motivating requirements. Nevertheless, it is less than straightforward to find guidelines on how to apply such methodologies for developing domain-specific knowledge graphs. ArCo is the knowledge graph of Italian Cultural Heritage and has been developed by using eXtreme Design (XD), an ODP- and test-driven methodology. During its development, XD has been adapted to the need of the CH domain e.g. gathering requirements from an open, diverse community of consumers, a new ODP has been defined and many have been specialised to address specific CH requirements. This paper presents ArCo and describes...

ScholarlyData is the reference linked dataset of the Semantic Web community about papers, people, organisations, and events related to its academic conferences. In this paper we present an extension of such a linked dataset and its associated ontology (i.e. the conference ontology) in order to represent research impact indicators. The latter includes both traditional (e.g. citation count) and alternative indicators (e.g. altmetrics).

Physicians developed their sublanguage (a system to represent medical concepts and their relations) to store and transmit general medical knowledge and patient-related information. Adequate formalisms are needed to obtain a standard representation of semantics of medical expressions for computer use. Comparison of the semantic contents of two expressions is possible only if a unique canonical form is defined; the transmission of medical facts or patient-related information is really meaningful only by defining a set of primitives (semantic categories and links) and the domains of values (concepts). These primitives must be harmonized to yield a “common core subset” of semantic categories and links. This subset provides a common basis; a procedure to register extension sets of primitives must also be defined, to comply with specific representation needs of specialties and classes of application software.

Abstract. Although is recognized that ontologies may help building better and more interoperable information systems, there is skepticism on the real impact they may have in the future. We believe that ontologies will succeed in the information system arena and no systems will ever be designed without an ontological approach. In this paper we demonstrate the effectiveness of the ontological approach by illustrating three case studies. We show how an ontological framework is able to support semantic interoperability in the domain of fishery, then we present the role of ontologies for managing clinical guidelines and finally we sketch up an ontological analysis aimed at the interoperability of genetics databases. 1.

ABSTRACT Links in webpages carry an intended semantics: usually, they indicate a relation between two things, a subject (something referenced to within the web page) and an object (the target webpage of the link, or something referred to within it). We designed and implemented a novel system, named Legalo, which uncovers the intended semantics of links by defining Semantic Web properties that capture its meaning. Legalo properties can be used for tagging links with semantic relations. The system can be used at http://wit.istc.cnr.it/stlab-tools/legalo.

We present Sentilo, an unsupervised, domain-independent system that performs sentiment analysis by hybridizing natural language processing techniques with semantic web technologies. Sentilo is able to recognize the holder of an opinion, to detect the topics and sub-topics in the scope of it, and to measure the sentiment expressed on each of them. All this information is represented formally by means of a RDF graph, and holders’ and topics’ identity is resolved on Linked Data. Sentilo is available as REST service, to be exploited by client applications, as well as as human-oriented demo that features an intuitive graphical user interface. Acknowledgements. This work is supported by the project PRISMA SMART CITIES, funded by the Italian Ministry of Research and Education under the program “Programma Operativo Nazionale”. 1 Semantic Sentiment Analysis Sentiment Analysis (SA) is one of the hottest problems currently studied in Natural Language Processing (NLP), and recently it has entered the Semantic Web world: [11] provides evidence that including semantic features to SA algorithms improves their performance. However, existing approaches at SA, even those that include semantic features, are mainly supervised and rely on the availability of manually annotated samples, hence they are usually domain-dependent. Differently, we have the ambitious goal of deeply hybridizing natural language processing and semantic technologies and building a domain-independent, unsupervised approach for computing SA of sentences. Another common aspect of most existing SA methods is that they neglect the identification of holders and topics of an opinion as a task per se, they mainly focus on interpreting the tone of a sentence by identifying terms that carry a particular sentiment polarity; it has been demonstrated that including topic detection in models used by algorithms for SA improves their results [2,6,13]. However, in such approaches, the SA analysis task melts the topic detection task, which is never evaluated separately. 4 http://wit.istc.cnr.it/stlab-tools/sentilo For example, given the following opinion: “Joy Ride is not an interesting film but the director John Dahl made a perfect work for his audience”; an ideal system would be able to identify several topics referred to by such opinionated sentence. “Joy Ride” is certainly one, the “work of John Dahl” associated with this movie is another one, and finally “John Dahl”. Additionally, such ideal system would be able to analyze that the sentiment expressed on “Joy Ride” is negative, while the sentiment expressed on the work of John Dahl, and on John Dahl himself is slightly positive, and that the whole sentence carries both positive and negative sentiments. In this paper we present a system named Sentilo, that, inspired by such an ideal behavior, analyses the sentiment of a sentence: it identifies the holder of an opinion, the topics and sub-topics of that opinion, and the sentiment expressed on each of them by the holder as well as the sentiment of the overall sentence. Topics, holder, and sentiments are represented as formal models (i.e., RDF/OWL graphs) and topics and holders are resolved on Linked Data in order to allow the aggregation of sentiments expressed on the same topic in different contexts or from different sources. Sentilo can be used by humans through an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI) or can be accessed through its REST API. The GUI serves mainly as a demonstrator of its capability, while the REST service has a clear commercial potential: the granularity of its results allows a client application to aggregate opinion analysis coming from different sources, on a specific or a general domain, based on shared holders and/or topics. Potential clients could be Amazon, TripAdvisor, iTunes, magazines and news, etc.; all stakeholders dealing with opinions or reviews that have interest in performing data analytics on such opinions during time. Additionally, political parties as well as companies putting new products on the market would be potential users of Sentilo, in order to monitor the impact of a new brand/product on target users by analyzing their opinions. 2 Analyzing opinions Sentilo implements a sophisticated approach for sentiment analysis. It makes the assumption that any sentence that it receives as input expresses an opinion. An opinionated sentence can or cannot carry an explicit sentiment. For example the sentence: John said that the patient was suffering from tick bite fever. does not express any explicit sentiment about the topic of the opinion, but it still expresses an opinion by John. Hence, in this case Sentilo only identifies the opinion holder, i.e. “John” who can be sometimes implicit the opinion trigger, i.e. “say” that can be implicit as well and the opinion topics. Notice that identifying the opinion trigger allows us to detect the opinion holder. Trigger verbs are recognized according to [12]. 5…

... are compatible with the provisions of international agreements on the protection of intellectualproperty rights”. ... 4. Breuker J. e den Haan N. Separating world and regulation knowledge: where is the ... 6. Delgado J., Gallego I., Llorente S., García R. IPROnto: An Ontology for Digital ...

In this chapter, we present ontology design patterns (ODPs), which are reusable modeling solutions that encode modeling best practices. ODPs are the main tool for performing pattern-based design of ontologies, which is an approach to ontology development that emphasizes reuse and promotes the development of a common “language” for sharing knowledge about ontology design best practices. We put specific focus on content ODPs (CPs) and show how they can be used within a particular methodology. CPs are domain-dependent patterns, ...

Interoperability on multiple levels, concerning both the ontologies themselves and their engineering activities, is a key requirement for ontology networks to be efficient, with minimal redundancy and high reuse. This requirement has a strict binding for software tools that can support some interoperability levels, yet they can be hindered by a lack of shared models and vocabularies describing the resources to be handled, as well as the ways of handling them. Here, three examples of metalevel vocabularies are proposed, each covering at least one peculiar interoperability aspect: OMV for modeling the artifacts themselves, LIR for managing a multilingual layer on top of them, and C-ODO Light for modeling collaboration-supportive life cycle management tasks and processes. All of these models lend themselves to handling by dedicated software tools and are all being employed within NeOn products.

ABSTRACT The notion of ontology network is relatively recent and rooted in the field of knowledge engineering. It concerns those ontology networks assembled at design time and established by their authors. Nowadays, however, the need to deal with heterogeneous semantic data sources, such as Linked Data and reengineered resources, gives rise to new use cases: ontologies now also need to be selected and combined in ways that were unpredictable at design time. This process is non-trivial and error-prone: if improperly dealt with, it can lead to loss of expressivity when interpreting resources (e.g. RDF graphs) as ontologies. Previous attempts at formally representing ontology relations assumed a controlled environment where axioms are unequivocally determined, and as such did not need to capture this distinction and its creeping issues. One possible solution is to assemble ontology networks at runtime by mimicking part of the design-time process; however, this requires that the difference between ontology networks assembled statically by their authors, and dynamically by consumer agents, be formally represented. The notion of virtual ontology network introduced here establishes this distinction. In this paper, we provide the theoretical underpinnings of virtual ontology network management. We define the representational primitives and abstract relationships that virtual networks are constructed upon. To validate the theory and demonstrate the feasibility of virtualization in contemporary ontology management, we show that this formal framework is compatible with the existing theory of ontology relations. To that end, we illustrate which constructs from existing representation languages can be used to implement the relations that characterize a virtual ontology network. We show this both in OWL 2 and with ε-connections. This paper is a prelude to actual virtualization methods that we have devised and implemented: the finalization of their evaluation is underway and will be presented as a follow-up to the work presented herein.

ABSTRACT The notion of ontology network is relatively recent and rooted in the field of knowledge engineering. It concerns those ontology networks assembled at design time and established by their authors. Nowadays, however, the need to deal with heterogeneous semantic data sources, such as Linked Data and reengineered resources, gives rise to new use cases: ontologies now also need to be selected and combined in ways that were unpredictable at design time. This process is non-trivial and error-prone: if improperly dealt with, it can lead to loss of expressivity when interpreting resources (e.g. RDF graphs) as ontologies. Previous attempts at formally representing ontology relations assumed a controlled environment where axioms are unequivocally determined, and as such did not need to capture this distinction and its creeping issues. One possible solution is to assemble ontology networks at runtime by mimicking part of the design-time process; however, this requires that the difference between ontology networks assembled statically by their authors, and dynamically by consumer agents, be formally represented. The notion of virtual ontology network introduced here establishes this distinction. In this paper, we provide the theoretical underpinnings of virtual ontology network management. We define the representational primitives and abstract relationships that virtual networks are constructed upon. To validate the theory and demonstrate the feasibility of virtualization in contemporary ontology management, we show that this formal framework is compatible with the existing theory of ontology relations. To that end, we illustrate which constructs from existing representation languages can be used to implement the relations that characterize a virtual ontology network. We show this both in OWL 2 and with ε-connections. This paper is a prelude to actual virtualization methods that we have devised and implemented: the finalization of their evaluation is underway and will be presented as a follow-up to the work presented herein.

High-quality and reusable ontologies are considered as key element of the Semantic Web and for successful semantic applications. Ontology Design Patterns (ODPs) are addressing these quality and reusability issues by providing different types of patterns supporting ontology designers. ODPs are collected in various repositories, such as the catalogue maintained by the University of Manchester and the ODP portal at small and do not cover all types of patterns and all domains. Semantic Web applications could also benefit from ...

In this work, we introduce ICON, an ontology that models artistic interpretations of artworks’ subject matter (i.e. iconographies) and meanings (i.e. symbols, iconological aspects). Developed by conceptualizing authoritative knowledge and notions taken from Panofsky’s levels of interpretation theory, ICON ontology focuses on the granularity of interpretations. It can be used to describe an interpretation of an artwork from the Pre-iconographical, Icongraphical, and Iconological levels. Its main classes have been aligned to ontologies that come from the domains of cultural descriptions (ArCo, CIDOC-CRM, VIR), semiotics (DOLCE), bibliometrics (CITO), and symbolism (Simulation Ontology), to grant a robust schema that can be extendable using additional classes and properties coming from these ontologies. The ontology was evaluated through competency questions that range from simple recognition on a specific level of interpretation to complex scenarios. Data written using this model was ...

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the importance of validated and updated scientific information to help policy makers, healthcare professionals, and the public. The speed in disseminating reliable information and the subsequent guidelines and policy implementation are also essential to save as many lives as possible. Trustworthy guidelines should be based on a systematic evidence review which uses reproducible analytical methods to collect secondary data and analyse them. However, the guidelines’ drafting process is time consuming and requires a great deal of resources. This paper aims to highlight the importance of accelerating and streamlining the extraction and synthesis of scientific evidence, specifically within the systematic review process. To do so, this paper describes the COKE (COVID-19 Knowledge Extraction framework for next generation discovery science) Project, which involves the use of machine reading and deep learning to design and implement a semi-automated system t...

ArCo (Architecture of Knowledge) is a collaborative project that involves the institute of the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage ICCD (Institute of Catalogue and Documentation) and the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies of CNR (Italian National Research Council). ArCo aims at modelling the wide domain of Italian cultural heritage for two main purposes: (i) building a network of ontologies, compatible and aligned whenever possible with existing ontologies, that can be used as a de facto standard for representing cultural heritage data; (ii) publishing ICCD data as LOD: about 800.000 publishable files stored in the ICCD General Catalogue database. In this paper, we present ArCo structure, design methods and tools, its growing community, and we delineate its importance, quality, and impact in using semantic technologies in the fruition of Cultural Heritage.

The need to guarantee digital archive interoperability has driven the standardization of resources forward. The tendency to make searchable on-line databases has stopped at data accessibility, often presented as a synthesis of the interpretation procedure. During data computerization, the creation of the database requires the selection of a model whose representation is left out of the encoding process. Formalising this knowledge would be helpful in reconstructing a real, semantic interoperability, especially in those areas such as iconographic analysis, where the connections between the formal representation schema used and the description of the archaeological data is greater. This contribution is based on techniques of sharing knowledge through conceptual representational models, such as ontologies. In particular it consists of extending the CIDOC CRM with DOLCE and aims at formalizing the relationship that the agent (the archaeologist) creates between an object and the model and...

The Internet of Things (IoT) is about inter-networking real word objects in order to foster data exchange and communication among things. In this work we present the IoT Application Profile (IoT-AP) ontology with a particular focus on the pattern-based design methodology used for modelling the ontology.

On December 31st 2019, the World Health Organization China Country Office was informed of cases of pneumonia of unknown etiology detected in Wuhan City. The cause of the syndrome was a new type of coronavirus isolated on January 7th 2020 and named Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome CoronaVirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). SARS-CoV-2 is the cause of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Since January 2020 an ever increasing number of scientific works related to the new pathogen have appeared in literature. Identifying relevant research outcomes at very early stages is challenging. In this work we use COVID-19 as a use-case for investigating: (1) which tools and frameworks are mostly used for early scholarly communication; (2) to what extent altmetrics can be used to identify potential impactful research in tight (i.e. quasi-zero-day) time-windows. A literature review with rigorous eligibility criteria is performed for gathering a sample composed of scientific papers about SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 ap...

It is typical of plugin-based platforms such as the Eclipse RCP to be extensible by addition of functionalities. Such systems can undoubtedly benefit from having a vast developer community contributing to their enrichment. However, the proliferation of functionalities plugged in a system can be detrimental to its usability and bring confusion and clutter, as users who lack prior knowledge of the available features and how to access them can be unable to spot those that suit their needs. We present Kali-ma, a tool that equips Eclipse- ...

In this chapter, we illustrate the work conducted at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) with the creation of a network of ontologies about fisheries, developed with NeOn technologies and methodologies. The network included the main thematic areas needed to talk about fish stocks (often referred to as aquatic resources) and included data sources of various types: reference data for time series, thesauri for document indexing, actual time series, and the reuse of an existing well-known ontology maintained by FAO (the geopolitical ontology). Such a network of ontologies was also used within a prototypical web-based application. After describing the methodologies used to create the network, and its contents and features, we draw some conclusions and highlight the lessons learned during the process.

Polysemy is a bottleneck for the demanding needs of semantic data management. We suggest the importance of a well-founded conceptual analysis for understanding some systematic structures underlying polysemy in the medical lexicon. We present some cases studies, which exploit the methods (ontological integration and general theories) and tools (description logics and ontology libraries) of the ONIONS methodology defined elsewhere by the authors. This paper addresses an aspect (systematic metomymies) of the project we are involved in, which investigates the feasibility of building a large-scale ontology library of medicine that integrates the most important medical terminology banks.

We present the most applicable aspects of our research in the conceptual integration of terminologies. From past experience, we claim that the conceptualizations provided for terminological ontologies need to be philosophically and linguistically grounded. We developed ONIONS, a methodology for integrating domain terminologies by exploiting a library of generic ontologies. Our current focus is on flexible and cooperative modelling of terminological ontologies. We adopt modular and negotiable architectures of ontologies and some WWW-oriented tools, such as Ontolingua and Ontosaurus.

... Analyzing the text from the the scenario description, an initial step consists in finding out what categories, eg from DBpedia, the project scenario ... 1. Bizer, C., Lehmann, J., Kobilarov, G., Auer, S., Becker, C., Cyganiak, R., Hellmann, S.: DB-pedia – A Crystallization Point for the ...

The overwhelming amount of information stored in various data repositories - including those available over the web - emphasizes the relevance of knowledge integration methodologies and techniques to facilitate data sharing. The need for such integration has been already ...

We present ontologydesignpatterns. org (ODP), a semantic web portal about ontology design patterns based on wiki technology, which aims at supporting a community around best practices for ontology design. ODP offers services for evaluation and training about ontology patterns, and a repository of OWL ontologies. ODP fosters several kinds of participation, from anonymous, read-only access to open-rating and quality-committee membership. Based on semantic wiki components, we have developed EvalWF, an ...

Abstract. Aemoo is a Web application supporting exploratory search over the Semantic Web. Through a simple keyword-based search interface, users can query Aemoo for information about any entity, which is then collected by aggregating knowledge from diverse sources such as linked data, Wikipedia, Twitter, and Google News. Such aggregation is performed according to cognitively-sound principles through the exploitation of knowledge patterns, and by exploiting semantic relations as well as interpreting hypertext links. Aemoo ...