ontology and taxonomy modeling quick guide

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Ontology modeling quick guideExperiences on Taxonomy and Ontology development work

heimo hanninen

Tieto,[email protected]

© 2011 Tieto Corporation

Why do we need better concepts for organizing information?

2 2011-02-09 [email protected]


Information is Constantly in Motion –- a need for better management

30% of people’s time is spent searching for

relevant information

Only one-third of CFOs believe that the information is easy to

use, tailored, cost-effective or integrated

17% of IT budgets for storage hardware and storage management software and people

More than 60% of CEOs believe their business needs toaccess and understand information faster to make swift decisions

30–50% of design time is copy management

85% of information is unstructured

Documents

Transactions

Customers

Partners

Employees

OrganizationsFinancials

Products

E-mails

Databases

Media

Webcontent

Reports

37% growth of disk storage in 2005

40% of IT budgets may be spent on integration

Source: IBM [email protected]


Corporate information in silos – a need for connecting layer

4 2011-05-11

Partners R&D Production ICT Sales &Marketing

HR

[email protected]


What is ontology in IT system scope?

Enterprise Architect Dmitry Bogachev – Topic Maps 2007

-metadata


IM Layers (a’la Heimo)

6 2011-05-03

projectproject technologytechnologyserviceservice

document

staffstaff

solutionsolutioncustomercustomer Business Ontology/Domain model:

-Business entities-With associations and

-Properties-Across domains

Taxonomy:-Categorize

-Hierarchical-Domain specific

Information:-with metadata

-identified-content and data

Direct link

Indirect link

Value chain:-Processes


Phased modelling work

7 2011-06-17

Preparation iterative iterative

[email protected]

© 2011 Tieto Corporation [email protected]

Recursive ontology development

8 2011-02-09

Visualize

FormalizePopulate

Analyze & Refine

•Biz reqs•Value chain•User study

•Biz reqs•Value chain•User study

•Conceptual modelCmap

•Conceptual modelCmap

•Logical modelUML class diagram

•Logical modelUML class diagram

•Implementation modelRDF(S), OWL, Topic Maps, XML schema

•Implementation modelRDF(S), OWL, Topic Maps, XML schema

testtest

Use case

Prototype

PilotUse case

Processwalk


About the design work

• A kind of data modeling and knowledge engineering• 80% of communication, 20% of design

• Top down: business needs the information• Bottom up: inventorying where to get the data• Middle out: start with a motivated gang, a small system• Skills required:

• SMEs, often a guy who has been around long enough (find them)• Communication and facilitation skills• Data modeling (visualization) skills

• Team work: to create understanding on situation and common goal• Deliver something tangible to review (PoC approach)• Focus on the business not on the technology• “Keep stakeholders close and enemies closer”



System development with semantic technology approachUnderstanding semantics of biz entities and taking good care of managing identities of entities and information related.1.Understand business (value proposition & process)2.Extract info objects needed in process:

• Entities, • their relationship, • properties and • info resources (links to docs)

3.Model the formal ontology in W3C: RDF/OWL or ISO: Topic Maps4.Analyze and build adapters to sources (mapping)5.Analyze biz app interface and provide methods and6.Create ontology queries and package results for methods



Finding critical information assets and mapping them to business objects

1.Biz Process Walk through

2. Describe biz entities, properties and relations in common biz language

3. Identify sources. Understand local glossaries

4. Create mapping from local to global glossary

R&D LogisticsManufac-

turing Marketing Sales

Distri-bution

CustomerSupport

ProductDesign

11

PDM, ERP CMS BI Sales &Marketing

Partner’sdata

CRM

Business ontology

Heimo Hänninen

[email protected]

© 2011 Tieto Corporation [email protected]

Faced problems in the real world• Poor data quality in source systems

• missing metadata, no identifiers, ad hoc field naming etc.

• Security mgt. • do you have to copy ACL or request it while user runs a query?

• Performance• if running complex queries

• Governance• difficult to define, who owns centralized knowledge service (it's not CMS, nor DW, nor CRM, nor

PDM but can benefit from those all). • Usage: everyone want to ride on a bus but nobody wants to run the bus company.

• Ontology is redundant metadata about data in other systems.• Not good for real time critical systems. Virtual ontology engine which reads data directly from

source is not here yet.

• Difficult to calculate the business case. • Not in ICT main stream.

• Educate and lobby managers, train developers to use sem tech

12 2011-03-04

ontology and taxonomy modeling quick guide

Education