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SerVCS: Serialization Agnostic Ontology Development in Distributed Settings

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Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (IC3K 2016)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 914))

Abstract

The development of domain-specific ontologies requires joint efforts among different groups of stakeholders, such as knowledge engineers and domain experts. During the development processes, ontology changes need to be tracked and propagated across developers. Version Control Systems (VCSs) collect metadata describing changes and allow for the synchronization of different versions of the same ontology. Commonly, VCSs follow optimistic approaches to enable the concurrent modification of ontology artifacts, as well as conflict detection and resolution. For conflict detection, VCSs usually apply techniques where files are compared line by line. However, ontology changes can be serialized in different ways during the development process. As a consequence, existing VCSs may detect a large number of false-positive conflicts, i.e., conflicts that do not result from ontology changes but from the fact that two ontology versions are differently serialized. We developed SerVCS in order to enhance VCSs to cope with different serializations of the same ontology, following the principle of prevention is better than cure. SerVCS resorts on unique ontology serializations and minimizes the number of false-positive conflicts. It is implemented on top of Git, utilizing tools such as Rapper and RDF-toolkit for syntax validation and unique serialization, respectively. We conducted an empirical evaluation to determine the conflict detection accuracy of SerVCS whenever simultaneous changes to an ontology are performed using different ontology editors. Experimental results suggest that SerVCS allows VCSs to conduct more effective synchronization processes by preventing false-positive conflicts.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    With “different serializations”, we refer to two different ontology files that represent the same ontology using the same syntax (RDF/XML, Turtle, Manchester, etc.) but use a different structure to list and group the ontology concepts.

  2. 2.

    Given two RDF-documents A and \(A^*\), and \(ChangeSet(A^*/A) = (\delta ^+(A^*/A),\) \(\delta ^-(A^*/A), < )\), there are only syntactical conflicts between A and \(A^*\), iff \(size(A^*)=size(A)\), and for each RDF triples \(t_i\) and \(t_j\):

    • \(t_i\) \(\in \) \(\delta ^-(A^*/A)\) and \(t_j\) \(\in \) \(\delta ^+(A^*/A)\),

    then, there is a pair (\(t_i\), \(t_j\)) \(\in \;<\;\), and \(t_i = (s, p, o_i)\), \(t_j = (s, p, o_j)\), and \(o_i\) \(\ne \) \(o_j\).

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Acknowledgements

This work has been supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme for the project BigDataEurope (grant no. 644564), and the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) for the projects Industrial Data Space (grant no. 01IS15054) and SDI-X (grant no. 01IS15035C).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Smart Data Analytics (SDA), University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany

    Lavdim Halilaj & Irlán Grangel-González

  2. Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems (IAIS), Sankt Augustin, Germany

    Lavdim Halilaj, Irlán Grangel-González, Maria-Esther Vidal & Steffen Lohmann

  3. TIB Leibniz Information Center for Science and Technology, Hannover, Germany

    Maria-Esther Vidal & Sören Auer

  4. L3S Research Center, University of Hannover, Hannover, Germany

    Maria-Esther Vidal & Sören Auer

Authors
  1. Lavdim Halilaj
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  2. Irlán Grangel-González
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  3. Maria-Esther Vidal
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  4. Steffen Lohmann
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  5. Sören Auer
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Lavdim Halilaj .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Instituto de Telecomunicações, Lisbon, Portugal

    Ana Fred

  2. Department of Software Technology, Delft University of Technology, Voorburg, Zuid-Holland, The Netherlands

    Jan Dietz

  3. Faculty of Exact Sciences and Engineering, University of Madeira, Funchal, Portugal

    David Aveiro

  4. Henley Business School, University of Reading, Reading, UK

    Kecheng Liu

  5. University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal

    Jorge Bernardino

  6. Instituto Politecnico de Setúbal (IPS), Setúbal, Portugal

    Joaquim Filipe

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Halilaj, L., Grangel-González, I., Vidal, ME., Lohmann, S., Auer, S. (2019). SerVCS: Serialization Agnostic Ontology Development in Distributed Settings. In: Fred, A., Dietz, J., Aveiro, D., Liu, K., Bernardino, J., Filipe, J. (eds) Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management. IC3K 2016. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 914. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99701-8_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99701-8_10

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