Automating Instance Migration in Response to Ontology Evolution
Mark Fischer – Queen’s Juergen Dingel – Queen’s Maged Elaasar – Carleton Steven Shaw – IBM
2
Agenda Overview Approach
Comparing Two Ontologies Creating a Transformation
Oital Analyzing a Transformation
Case Study Future Work Conclusion
MODELS 2013 Workshop
3
Overview Migration
Move individuals from one ontology to another.
Motivation This setup reflects the
way IBM’s Design Management tool stores models as Ontologies.
MODELS 2013 Workshop
4
Overview Developed:
Automated:
MODELS 2013 Workshop
5
Approach We let the Migration be performed via a
Transformation
Creating this transformation is hard. Add steps to make it easier
What would help? Some way of comparing two ontologies An easy way to write a transformation Ways to test/analyze transformations for correctness
MODELS 2013 Workshop
6
Comparing Two Ontologies There are many competing ways to compare ontologies
For creating these sorts of transformations, only those parts of an ontology that may effect individuals are of any interest. We are interested in Axioms For any axiom, C, the axiom and all other axioms it is
influenced by is called the context of C
MODELS 2013 Workshop
7
Comparing Two Ontologies
MODELS 2013 Workshop
8
Comparing Two Ontologies: Original
MODELS 2013 Workshop
9
Comparing Two Ontologies: Updated
MODELS 2013 Workshop
10
Creating a Transformation Use domain-specific language
We created Oital
About Oital Syntax based off of the Manchester Owl syntax Becomes a form of documentation Has an integrated development environment called
Oital-T
MODELS 2013 Workshop
11
Oital An Oital transformation
consists of: Actions which delete or create
individuals and their properties TransformationClasses which
define a category of individual based off of a query
The order of actions does matter
TransformationClasses change depending on their context
MODELS 2013 Workshop
12
Analyzing a Transformation We currently support a form of Abstract
Interpretation How does it help?
Lets you isolate specific properties of the input and output of a transformation
Example: Abstract Interpretation of Class Membership can answer the following questions
Does every individual which is a member of a removed class get migrated so that it is a member of an existing class?
Which classes are guaranteed to have no individuals? Are individuals being migrated into more restrictive classes?
MODELS 2013 Workshop
13
Case Study Use IBM’s Ontology encoding of UML 2.1.1, UML 2.2, and UML
2.4.1 to recreate their migration using this approach. UML 2.4.1 has:
255 Named Classes 801 Anonymous Classes (enumerated, union, complement,
intersection, restriction) 594 properties
Comparing UML 2.1.1 and UML 2.2: # of must investigate axioms: 38 # of should investigate axioms: 118 # of ok axioms: 4361
MODELS 2013 Workshop
14
When to use this approach It is often faster to migrate manually
Transformation are general and can make no assumptions about any specific set of individuals
When does this approach make most sense? When ontology developers and users are different people. When there are many users (applications) using the evolving
ontology When there is no way of predicting how an ontology will be
used
MODELS 2013 Workshop
15
Future Work More analysis!
Abstract interpretation isn’t the only helpful form of analysis possible.
Continue development on Oital-T Discover usage patterns for Oital
Integrate them into the language or tool to insure ease of use.
Case study. Continue with IBM UML case study
MODELS 2013 Workshop
16
Conclusion Of great importance to the efficient use of an
ontology is the ability to easily effect change.
The approach described here facilitates a way of keeping certain types of ontological artifacts up to date in a way that is, potentially, very scalable.
MODELS 2013 Workshop
17
References Natalya F. Noy and Michel Klein. Ontology evolution: Not the same as
schema evolution. Knowledge and Information Systems, 6(4):428–440. Peter Plessers, Olga De Troyer, and Sven Casteleyn. Understanding
ontology evolution: A change detection approach. Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web, 5(1):39–49, 2007.
Asad Masood Khattak, Zeeshan Pervez, Sungyoung Lee, and Young-Koo Lee. After effects of ontology evolution. 5th International Conference on Future Information Technology. IEEE, 2010.
Matthew Horridge and Peter F. Patel-Schneider. OWL 2 Web Ontology Language Manchester Syntax. W3C Working Group Note. Dec 11, 2012.
Sean Bechhofer, Frank van Harmelen, Jim Hendler, Ian Horrocks, Deborah L. McGuinness, Peter F. Patel-Schneider, and Lynn Andrea Stein. Owl web ontology language reference. February 2004.
MODELS 2013 Workshop
