With the growing popularity of large-scale collaborative ontology-engineering projects, such as the creation of the 11th revision of the International Classification of Diseases, we need new methods and insights to help project- and community-managers to cope with the constantly growing complexity of such projects. In this paper, we present a novel application of Markov chains to model sequential usage patterns that can be found in the change-logs of collaborative ontology-engineering projects. We provide a detailed presentation of the analysis process, describing all the required steps that are necessary to apply and determine the best fitting Markov chain model. Amongst others, the model and results allow us to identify structural properties and regularities as well as predict future actions based on usage sequences. We are specifically interested in determining the appropriate Markov chain orders which postulate on how many previous actions future ones depend on. To demonstrate the practical usefulness of the extracted Markov chains we conduct sequential pattern analyses on a large-scale collaborative ontology-engineering dataset, the International Classification of Diseases in its 11th revision. To further expand on the usefulness of the presented analysis, we show that the collected sequential patterns provide potentially actionable information for user-interface designers, ontology-engineering tool developers and project-managers to monitor, coordinate and dynamically adapt to the natural development processes that occur when collaboratively engineering an ontology. We hope that presented work will spur a new line of ontology-development tools, evaluation-techniques and new insights, further taking the interactive nature of the collaborative ontology-engineering process into consideration. HighlightsWe provide a novel application for Markov.Using Markov chains we extract and analyze sequential usage patterns.We categorize the types of analyses that Markov chains enable us to perform.We demonstrate the utility of the Markov chain analysis on a large-scale project.
A number of tools, such as the OntoWiki @cite_3 , the MoKi @cite_29 , Soboleo @cite_44 or PoolParty @cite_30 support collaborative ontology engineering, focusing on supporting and augmenting different aspects of collaborative development processes of ontologies. For example, Semantic MediaWikis @cite_4 add semantic capabilities to traditional Wiki systems. They are intended to help users navigating the Wikis by introducing more meaningful semantic links and support of richer queries. Some of the Semantic Wikis available today focus on with semantic links in order to allow more meaningful navigation and to support richer queries. Semantic Wikis usually associate a page to a particular instance in the ontology, and the semantic annotations are converted into properties of that instance. As an ontology represents a formalized and abstract version of a specific domain, disagreements between authors on certain subjects can occur. Similar to face-to-face meetings, these collaborative ontology-engineering projects need tools that augment collaboration and help contributors in reaching consensus especially when modeling (controversial) topics of the real world.
@cite_30 @cite_4 @cite_29 @cite_3 @cite_44
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We present OntoWiki, a tool providing support for agile, distributed knowledge engineering scenarios. OntoWiki facilitates the visual presentation of a knowledge base as an information map, with different views on instance data. It enables intuitive authoring of semantic content, with an inline editing mode for editing RDF content, similar to WYSIWYG for text documents. It fosters social collaboration aspects by keeping track of changes, allowing to comment and discuss every single part of a knowledge base, enabling to rate and measure the popularity of content and honoring the activity of users. Ontowiki enhances the browsing and retrieval by offering semantic enhanced search strategies. All these techniques are applied with the ultimate goal of decreasing the entrance barrier for projects and domain experts to collaborate using semantic technologies. In the spirit of the Web 2.0 OntoWiki implements an ”architecture of participation” that allows users to add value to the application as they use it. It is available as open-source software and a demonstration platform can be accessed at http: 3ba.se. With the emergence of tools for collaborative ontology engineering, more and more data about the creation process behind collaborative construction of ontologies is becoming available. Today, collaborative ontology engineering tools such as Collaborative Protege offer rich and structured logs of changes, thereby opening up new challenges and opportunities to study and analyze the creation of collaboratively constructed ontologies. While there exists a plethora of visualization tools for ontologies, they have primarily been built to visualize aspects of the final product the ontology and not the collaborative processes behind construction e.g. the changes made by contributors over time. To the best of the authors' knowledge, there exists no ontology visualization tool today that focuses primarily on visualizing the history behind collaboratively constructed ontologies. Since the ontology engineering processes can influence the quality of the final ontology, they believe that visualizing process data represents an important stepping-stone towards better understanding of managing the collaborative construction of ontologies in the future. In this application paper, the authors present a tool-PragmatiX-which taps into structured change logs provided by tools such as Collaborative Protege to visualize various pragmatic aspects of collaborative ontology engineering. The tool is aimed at managers and leaders of collaborative ontology engineering projects to help them in monitoring progress, in exploring issues and problems, and in tracking quality-related issues such as overrides and coordination among contributors. The paper makes the following contributions: i They present PragmatiX, a tool for visualizing the creation process behind collaboratively constructed ontologies ii the authors illustrate the functionality and generality of the tool by applying it to structured logs of changes of two large collaborative ontology-engineering projects and iii they conduct a heuristic evaluation of the tool with domain experts to uncover early design challenges and opportunities for improvement. Finally, the authors hope that this work sparks a new line of research on visualization tools for collaborative ontology engineering projects. Traditionally, evaluation methods in the field of semantic technologies have focused on the end result of ontology engineering efforts, mainly, on evaluating ontologies and their corresponding qualities and characteristics. This focus has led to the development of a whole arsenal of ontology-evaluation techniques that investigate the quality of ontologies as a product. In this paper, we aim to shed light on the process of ontology engineering construction by introducing and applying a set of measures to analyze hidden social dynamics. We argue that especially for ontologies which are constructed collaboratively, understanding the social processes that have led to their construction is critical not only in understanding but consequently also in evaluating the ontologies. With the work presented in this paper, we aim to expose the texture of collaborative ontology engineering processes that is otherwise left invisible. Using historical change-log data, we unveil qualitative differences and commonalities between different collaborative ontology engineering projects. Explaining and understanding these differences will help us to better comprehend the role and importance of social factors in collaborative ontology engineering projects. We hope that our analysis will spur a new line of evaluation techniques that view ontologies not as the static result of deliberations among domain experts, but as a dynamic, collaborative and iterative process that needs to be understood, evaluated and managed in itself. We believe that advances in this direction would help our community to expand the existing arsenal of ontology evaluation techniques towards more holistic approaches. Ontologies are considered a key technology enabling semantic interoperability and integration of data and processes. We are now entering a phase of knowledge system development, in which ontologies are produced in larger numbers and exhibit greater complexity. Also we have witnessed an increasing need for technologies that enable the reuse of existing (Semantic) Web resources from within the ontology engineering environment itself. In the NeOn project we aim at advancing the state of the art in using ontologies for large-scale semantic applications. This is realized by providing an infrastructure for networked ontology management and engineering capable of suiting the community’s needs [1]. The heart of this infrastructure is the NeOn Toolkit for engineering contextualized networked ontologies and semantic applications. The shift from closed semantic applications, characterized by a monolithic corporate ontology, to open semantic applications, characterized by networks of ontologies, implies that a number of other aspects like dealing with context, collaboration or data and web integration become crucial. The NeOn Toolkit was built with the web-centric elements of semantic technologies in mind: much like Web 2.0 environments emphasize distributed content production, the NeOn Toolkit features methods and tools for managing knowledge that is distributed, heterogeneous, contextualized, and developed collaboratively.