Ontology Design Pattern Property Specialisation Strategies

Tracking #: 715-1925

Authors: 
Karl Hammar

Responsible editor: 
Guest Editors EKAW 2014 Schlobach Janowicz

Submission type: 
Conference Style
Abstract: 
Ontology Design Patterns (ODPs) show potential in enabling simpler, faster, and more correct Ontology Engineering by laymen and experts alike. For ODP adoption to take off, improved tool support for ODP use in Ontology Engineering is required. This paper presents and evaluates the effects of a set of discovered strategies for object property specialisation in ODPs, and suggests tool improvements based on those strategies.
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Decision/Status: 
[EKAW] conference only accept

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Review #1
Anonymous submitted on 15/Aug/2014
Suggestion:
[EKAW] conference only accept
Review Comment:

Overall evaluation
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== 3 strong accept
2 accept
== 1 weak accept
== 0 borderline paper
== -1 weak reject
== -2 reject
== -3 strong reject

Reviewer's confidence
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5 (expert)
== 4 (high)
== 3 (medium)
== 2 (low)
== 1 (none)

Interest to the Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management Community
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5 excellent
== 4 good
== 3 fair
== 2 poor
== 1 very poor

Novelty
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5 excellent
== 4 good
== 3 fair
== 2 poor
== 1 very poor

Technical quality
Select your choice from the options below and write its number below.
== 5 excellent
== 4 good
3 fair
== 2 poor
== 1 very poor

Evaluation
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== 5 excellent
4 good
== 3 fair
== 2 poor
== 1 not present

Clarity and presentation
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== 5 excellent
== 4 good
== 3 fair
2 poor
== 1 very poor

Review

The paper presents an exploratory and experimental approach to assessing the use and effects of the 'properties-based approach' and 'class-based approach' and a hybrid model with respect to adding subclasses (and defining them) and sub-properties, starting with ODPs and their use in the field, then also other ontologies, and closing off with performance. The paper meanders around following the author's journey, but the multiple new insights presented are definitely useful for ontology engineering.
Notwithstanding, there's room for improvement. And it would be a plus if the test data can be made available online.

Detailed comments:

The abstract is too short and does not cover the paper's contents (nor does the title) or the main results. e.g., on p2 there's a paragraph on "main contributions…", some of which can go in the abstract.

Section 1. Introduction
it is irrelevant that WOP is held in conjunction with ISWC, and can be removed

Section 3.
In the study set-up, it has not been made clear why Linked Open Vocabularies and LOD data should be included, as opposed to just ontologies. Later on in the paper the author zooms in on desiring to query and classify instances, but this is not obvious upfront (and wouldn't be the only scenario).
That so little different types of ODPs have been used (table 2) is interesting of itself, and worth looking into.
Section 3.1 already introduces the "property-oriented" and "class-oriented" notions, but they are only properly introduced in section 3.2.
p6 "ODP specialisations that modify the semantics of object properties", and, similar, on p9 first sentence of section 4: no, not w.r.t. the language. Arguably, the subject domain semantics. I'm assuming the author refers to 'modifying' in the sense of changing the domain and/or range declarations, but that should be made clear.
"Formally, the owl:subPropertyOf definition implies … are more narrow than those of their superproperties.". No, that is not what the OWL standard says. It means that when OPE1 isa OPE2, then "if an individual x is connected by OPE1 to an individual y, then x is also connected by OPE2 to y". What the author assumes, and wants it to be, is analyzed and discussed in detail in:

Keet, C.M. Detecting and Revising Flaws in OWL Object Property Expressions. 18th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW'12), A. ten Teije et al. (Eds.). Oct 8-12, Galway, Ireland. Springer, LNAI 7603, 252-266.

There is also a sloppiness on the logic aspects on p9, first paragraph. Although the second paragraph qualifies the "corresponds" as not to be meant to be equivalence, it goes on later to say in the 'hybrid strategy' section that the class ones are "logically redundant": they are not for the general case. It would be useful to know how often there are equivalences asserted with only one property, but Algorithm 1 does not detect that (it stops at having found one instance, but there may be more. it does not check for the latter, for it's just a single if, and the caption doesn't make it more convincing saying there is a loop: if there was a loop, then it should be a while statement, not an if).

Section 4.
On the strategy effects, "Yet another advantage is that,…": where does that assertion come from? not the author's results (at least, not at that stage in the paper).
"…including in querying, where SPARQL triple patterns…": that just as well can be a disadvantage: with 'underspecified' object properties, one will end up with too many tuples returned by a query, a bunch of them being irrelevant, but which more easily can be avoided with specialization of object properties, and using the specialized property in the query.
Please add the versions of Pellet and HermiT that were used. Also, Konqueror was the best performing reasoner in ORE 2014, showing substantially better performance, which may be worthwhile checking out. Further, I still miss the use case scenario description on why data.
"reported results of the reasoning tasks were equivalent,": I presume the author meant that the deductions--set of inferred axioms--were the same for that test case.

Section 5. Discussion
much leaves to be discussed (and 'limitations', not "delimitations").
While the author seems to be bent on putting everything in an ODP straightjacket, why not, at least, have an ODP for either modeling choice? Or something else?
"If this is the case, and if this more common use of the class-oriented strategy is a consequence": this is just guessing. The ODP-users may well have been influenced by the pizza ontology tutorial that advises against declaring domain and range restrictions, and those other users by conceptual data modeling that introduces new associations/relationship for pretty much everything. whichever.

Typos, presentation:

There are multiple typos, and the paper will need a careful reading to fix them.
Tables should have a horizontal line at the top, not 'open'.
The number of instances of the ways of specialization with the ODPs in section 3.2 ideally shouldn't be buried in the text, as they become important later on. Maybe put them in a table as well, for easy comparison. This I had to do manually myself now with the table and text in first paragraph on p11 and those preceding ODP results paragraphs (but I wouldn't want to have to do that).
Overall, the flow of the paper could be improved upon by, possibly, first, the 'preliminary' experiment that analyses ODP usage (could be shortened), then stating there are these properties-based and class-based approaches, results with a content ODP favoring one and to compare that with 'in the wild' without ODPs, and then trade-offs between the two options including the performance testing. If space is needed: the extreme design easily can be dropped without affecting the flow, results, and message of the paper.

Review #2
Anonymous submitted on 26/Aug/2014
Suggestion:
[EKAW] conference only accept
Review Comment:

Overall evaluation
Select your choice from the options below and write its number below.

== 3 strong accept
== 2 accept
== 1 weak accept
== 0 borderline paper
== -1 weak reject
== -2 reject
== -3 strong reject
2

Reviewer's confidence
Select your choice from the options below and write its number below.

== 5 (expert)
== 4 (high)
== 3 (medium)
== 2 (low)
== 1 (none)
4

Interest to the Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management Community
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== 5 excellent
== 4 good
== 3 fair
== 2 poor
== 1 very poor
4

Novelty
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== 5 excellent
== 4 good
== 3 fair
== 2 poor
== 1 very poor
5

Technical quality
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== 5 excellent
== 4 good
== 3 fair
== 2 poor
== 1 very poor
4

Evaluation
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== 5 excellent
== 4 good
== 3 fair
== 2 poor
== 1 not present
4

Clarity and presentation
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== 5 excellent
== 4 good
== 3 fair
== 2 poor
== 1 very poor
4

Review
Please provide your textual review here.

The author presents an analysis on the strategies that ontology engineers take when specializing properties in ontology design patterns. Overall, this is a very nice and readable paper. I would recommend its acceptance to the conference and a substantially extended version could also be accepted to the SWJ.

In terms of novelty, the paper's attempt is indeed novel. The significance of this paper is more on the opening of new research directions and interesting questions to work on for future research.

The evaluation is sufficient, though focused only on one aspect: reasoning performance. Since the paper only aims to put forth an argument for the needs of a better tool to serve the need of ODP specialization, I think the paper does achieve its objective.

----- typos/grammatical corrections --------
p3, par 4: need make --> need to make

Review #3
Anonymous submitted on 03/Sep/2014
Suggestion:
[EKAW] combined track accept
Review Comment:

Overall evaluation
Select your choice from the options below and write its number below.

== 3 strong accept
== 2 accept
x 1 weak accept
== 0 borderline paper
== -1 weak reject
== -2 reject
== -3 strong reject

Reviewer's confidence
Select your choice from the options below and write its number below.

x 5 (expert)
== 4 (high)
== 3 (medium)
== 2 (low)
== 1 (none)

Interest to the Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management Community
Select your choice from the options below and write its number below.

x 5 excellent
== 4 good
== 3 fair
== 2 poor
== 1 very poor

Novelty
Select your choice from the options below and write its number below.

== 5 excellent
x 4 good
== 3 fair
== 2 poor
== 1 very poor

Technical quality
Select your choice from the options below and write its number below.
== 5 excellent
== 4 good
x 3 fair
== 2 poor
== 1 very poor

Evaluation
Select your choice from the options below and write its number below.
== 5 excellent
== 4 good
x 3 fair
== 2 poor
== 1 not present

Clarity and presentation
Select your choice from the options below and write its number below.
== 5 excellent
== 4 good
x 3 fair
== 2 poor
== 1 very poor

Review

Structure of the paper

1 Introduction
2 related work
3 ODP specialisation
4 Strategy usage
5 Discussion
6 Conclusions
14 references (no self references)

The paper presents an interesting analysis on the strategies used for ODP adoption and specialization.
More specifically the author identifies three possible strategies for OPD specialization, i.e.: (i) property-oriented, (ii) class-oriented, and (iii) hybrid strategy.
Those strategies are discussed and evaluated with respect to a set of ontologies retrieved on-line.
The evaluation is aimed at capturing how the strategies are adopted effectively by ontology engineers and what are the effects in terms of complexity for reasoning deriving by using one strategy ore another.

However, the paper also presents some weaknesses:

* the sample used for the evaluation is very limited (only 20 ontologies with explicit owl:imports axioms having an ODP as object) and it is not clear what is the object of the specialization, i.e., ODPs, vocabularies, etc, in the sample of 405 ontologies;
* the algorithm proposed for automatically classifying ontologies with respect to the strategies presented is not evaluated. Hence, this can bias the evaluation that is further presented;
* the results of the reasoning complexity deriving by the adoption of one specialization strategy or another show how the property-oriented strategy is much faster than the class-oriented one. What are the logic complexities deriving by both strategies?

The state of the art presented is fair. The form of presentation should be improved,
the paper is not easy to read. For instance the motivation and the main research question
are very specific and can be understood only by specialists