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Ontologies-Based Platform for Sociocultural Knowledge Management

Journal on Data Semantics

Abstract

In this paper, we present a sociocultural platform aiming at persevering and capitalizing sociocultural events in Senegal. This platform relies on Semantic Web technologies. First, we discuss the two ontologies we provided to support our platform: an upper-level sociocultural ontology and a human time ontology (HuTO). To build our upper-level ontology, we proposed a methodology based on the theory of Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky called “Vygotskian Framework”. We also present how the upper-level ontology can be matched in the linked open data cloud. On the other hand, we present the HuTO of which major contributions are (i) the modeling of non-convex intervals (repetitive interval) like every Monday, (ii) representation of deictic temporal expressions which form specific relations with time speech and (iii) qualitative temporal notions which are temporal notions relative to a culture or a geographical position. Finally, we discuss the platform designed on top of Semantic MediaWiki to apply our scientific contributions. Indeed, the platform allows Senegalese communities to share and co-construct their sociocultural knowledge.

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Notes

  1. Aspect related both to society and to culture.

  2. http://wiki.dbpedia.org/about, 06/07/2015.

  3. http://ns.inria.fr/huto/.

  4. http://ontologydesignpatterns.org/wiki/Submissions:TimeInterval.

  5. We use 24-h format for representing hours.

  6. In the representation, the context of Today has been omitted to avoid overloading the example.

  7. Fanal is a Carnival, and Ndar (Saint-Louis) is a city north of Senegal.

  8. http://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/senegal/dakar.

  9. http://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/australia/sydney.

  10. Period of 12 days to celebrate the birth of the Prophet of Islam.

  11. Lamb is the national wrestling sport which regroups many teams organized by ethnic, cities, etc. We have also a national championship which duration is 9 months.

  12. WetSeason is one of two tropical seasons we have in Senegal. It corresponds to the raining season.

  13. http://semantic-mediawiki.org. In this paper, we used SMW 2.1.3.

  14. http://virtuoso.openlinksw.com/. In the paper we used virtuoso-opensource-develop-7.

  15. http://www.simile-widgets.org.

  16. http://www.simile-widgets.org/exhibit/.

  17. http://lov.okfn.org/dataset/lov/vocabs?tag=Time.

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Acknowledgments

This work is partially funded by Creatic4Africa Consortium, AUF (Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie) and LIRIMA (Laboratoire International de Recherche en Informatique et Mathématiques Appliquées). Special thanks to Diego Berrueta and Luis Polo for their help to design the first prototype. The anonymous referees of this paper provided a valuable list of comments that have been used to improve this paper.

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Correspondence to Papa Fary Diallo.

Appendix

Appendix

Figure 11 shows a general overview of HuTO’s main concepts and properties.

Currently, we provided thirty five normalization and reasoning rules and one correction rule, but in this section we illustrate only some of them. Note that these rules concern only the Gregorian calendar.

Defining Leap Year

The two rules below check the leap years on the data and add the appropriate information. Thereby during the information retrieval, if a year doesn’t have leapYear property set to true it means it is not a leap year. There are two rules: the first one is when \(\mathbf year mod 4 = 0 and year mod 100 ! = 0 \); the second one is when \(\mathbf year mod 400 = 0 \).

figure k

Adds the number of day, number of the month and the parity of the month

figure l

Adds the calendar months

figure m

We have created this kind of rules such as determining the number of day for the February month, the parity of months and the years. All these rules allow to add appropriate information which are necessaries to retrieve information such as Which resources occur on odd month, Which resources occur from 01/22/2015 to 02/2/2015, etc.

after and before properties are inverses

figure n

after is a transitive property (propagation rule)

figure o

If Allen’s relation is expressed on TemporalAnnotation then this rule adds appropriate information on the TemporalExp (case of after)

figure p

If Allen’s relation is expressed on TemporalExp then this rule adds appropriate information on the TemporalAnnotation (case of after)

figure q

Equivalent rules have been provided for before property which has the same characteristics as after property.

Logical characteristics of Allen’s relations. Annotation relying on hasBegin and hasEnd properties (case of after)

On the logical characteristics of Allen relations we check the data on which satisfy them. The two next rules check the data pairs which satisfy after logical characteristics. Equivalent rules have been provided for before property which has same characteristics as after property.

figure r

Logical characteristics of Allen’s relations. Resources expressed with hasDate property (case of after)

figure s

Logical characteristics of Allen’s relations. Apply to the resources which have dates ordered (case of after)

figure t

Normalize intervals (when using start on January without specifying the day it means the 1st January or when using end on January without specifying the day it means the 31st January)

figure u

In our modeling approach, we consider any entity as an interval. Thus, this previous rule normalizes the approach. The rule normalizes both intervals expressed with hasBeging and hasEnd properties.

Normalize intervals described by duration

The two next rules are used to normalize intervals expressed by duration and hasBegin property. They add the appropriate end relative to the starting date. Note that, we created six rules about it because the rule is reliant on the format of the duration.

Note that equivalent rules have been provided for intervals expressed by duration and hasEnd property.

figure v

Correction Query

The query above checks both the consistency when TemporalExp concepts contains Cycle concept and when Cycle concepts contains TemporalExp. Note that if the query returns a result, one must again check if the entered values respect the scheduling because one can have multiple levels in an annotation. For instance, the expression From 2015, every Friday at 17H one organizes a football match has three levels. These levels are From 2015, every Friday and at 17H. Thereby, the query has to check each corresponding pair.

figure w

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Diallo, P.F., Corby, O., Mirbel, I. et al. Ontologies-Based Platform for Sociocultural Knowledge Management. J Data Semant 5, 117–139 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13740-016-0065-4

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