Confluence: Versatile Support for Ontology Construction

[funded by Ordnance Survey, UK]

The goal of the project is to design and implement a multi-faceted software tool to support domain experts (ecologists, geographers, emergency planners, etc.) without knowledge engineering skills to create and maintain a conceptual ontology. The tool will be based on open source technologies and released under open source licenses. It will be developed by a multidisciplinary team involving researchers and developers from the University of Leeds and Ordnance Survey, and will be tailored to the current needs of Ordnance Survey (OS).

Developing topographic ontologies at OS is considered as a key activity that will enable third parties to integrate their data with topographic data OS provides. A methodology for ontology development has been proposed by a multi-disciplinary team of geographers and computer scientists at OS, and tested in a Hydrology case study. The distinctive characteristic of the OS methodology is the emphasis on the active involvement of domain experts who construct conceptual ontologies in their subject area. This requires splitting the ontology construction process into two separate, but interrelated, stages:

• conceptual ontology modelling (performed by domain experts)
• logical ontology modelling (performed by knowledge engineers)

The OS methodology appears very promising because it results in an expressive ontology that reflects domain experts’ views. However, it was found that the efficiency and effectiveness of ontology construction was hindered by the lack of tools that can support domain experts in identifying and entering the main concepts and relations in the specific domain and, at the same time, produce formal ontologies in approved representation languages to facilitate reuse and interoperability. The development of such a tool is the goal of the project.