Towards Ontology-Driven Information Systems
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The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School College of Information Sciences and Technology TOWARDS ONTOLOGY-DRIVEN INFORMATION SYSTEMS: GUIDELINES TO THE CREATION OF NEW METHODOLOGIES TO BUILD ONTOLOGIES A Dissertation in Information Sciences and Technology by Andrey Soares © 2009 Andrey Soares Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2009 The dissertation of Andrey Soares was reviewed and approved* by the following: Frederico Fonseca Associate Professor of Information Sciences and Technology Dissertation Adviser Chair of Committee Mary Beth Rosson Professor of Information Sciences and Technology David Hall Professor of Information Sciences and Technology Timothy Simpson Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Industrial Engineering John Yen Professor of Information Sciences and Technology Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Programs *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School. ii ABSTRACT This research targeted the area of Ontology-Driven Information Systems, where ontology plays a central role both at development time and at run time of Information Systems (IS). In particular, the research focused on the process of building domain ontologies for IS modeling. The motivation behind the research was the fact that researchers have not yet produced comprehensive guidelines for building ontologies for IS. A recent survey reported that 60% of the respondents did not use any methodology to build their ontologies. Ontology engineering is still considered an art, rather than and engineering activity. The results of our preliminary research on building an ontology for a given domain revealed four important issues related to Ontology-Driven Information Systems. These issues are related to metamodels, procedural knowledge, temporal relations and knowledge acquisition. Based on these concerns, we set up a research to investigate existing methodologies that could provide principled guidelines to build ontologies and to overcome the issues raised in the preliminary study. We searched major bibliographic databases from which we selected 30 methodologies to investigate. The analysis of the methodologies was formulated around the core components of an ontology and the four issues raised in our preliminary research. We also discussed the methodological features that are relevant to the process of building ontologies for Information Systems. Our final results confirmed the four issues among the methodologies analyzed. Besides, axiomatization has emerged as another important issue for Ontology-Driven Information Systems. Moreover, the frequent use of scenarios in the initial steps of the methodologies motivated us to further investigate their use in building ontologies. We proposed to use the components of a scenario as the ontological constructs of a metamodel ontology. To illustrate the use of scenarios in the building of domain ontologies, we developed a proof-of-concept experiment. The experiment successfully showed that a scenario-based approach can help acquiring and representing relevant domain knowledge to be used in IS modeling, and can be used to improve the methodologies used to build ontologies. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures...............................................................................................................................................vi List of Tables............................................................................................................................................... vii Acknowledgements.................................................................................................................................... viii Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION......................................................................................................................1 1.1 Motivation ....................................................................................................................................3 1.2 Scope and problem space .............................................................................................................4 1.3 Research objective and questions.................................................................................................6 1.4 Dissertation organization..............................................................................................................7 Chapter 2. BACKGROUND ........................................................................................................................9 2.1 Conceptual modeling..................................................................................................................10 2.2 Ontology.....................................................................................................................................13 2.2.1 Components of an ontology...................................................................................................15 2.2.2 Ontology levels......................................................................................................................16 2.2.3 Ontology-Driven Information Systems .................................................................................18 2.2.4 Ontology engineering ............................................................................................................21 2.3 Knowledge representation..........................................................................................................23 2.4 Knowledge acquisition...............................................................................................................25 2.5 Temporal relations......................................................................................................................28 2.6 Scenarios ....................................................................................................................................29 2.7 Summary ....................................................................................................................................32 Chapter 3. AN EXPERIMENT IN BULDING ONTOLOGIES FOR IS ...............................................33 3.1 Domain data source....................................................................................................................33 3.2 Methodologies used to build the domain ontology ....................................................................34 3.2.1 Methontology ........................................................................................................................34 3.2.2 Ontology development 101 ...................................................................................................35 3.2.3 Skeletal methodology ............................................................................................................36 3.3 Issues found in the process of building the domain ontology.....................................................36 3.3.1 Metamodel.............................................................................................................................37 3.3.2 Procedural knowledge ...........................................................................................................38 3.3.3 Temporal relations.................................................................................................................39 3.3.4 Knowledge acquisition ..........................................................................................................39 3.4 Searching for methodologies to overcome the issues.................................................................40 3.5 Summary ....................................................................................................................................40 Chapter 4. LITERATURE REVIEW OF METHODOLOGIES ............................................................41 4.1 Systematic reviews.....................................................................................................................41 4.2 Identification of the need for a review .......................................................................................42 4.3 Development of a review protocol .............................................................................................43 4.3.1 Background ...........................................................................................................................44 4.3.2 Research questions ................................................................................................................44 4.3.3 Search strategy.......................................................................................................................46 4.3.4 Inclusion and exclusion criteria.............................................................................................48 4.3.5 Quality assessment ................................................................................................................50 4.3.6 Data extraction strategy.........................................................................................................51 4.3.7 Synthesis strategy ..................................................................................................................53 4.4 Identification of studies..............................................................................................................54 4.5 Selection of primary studies .......................................................................................................55