INFLUENCE
AND SELECTION OF BASIC CONCEPTS ON
ONTOLOGY DESIGN
Tomasz Boinski, Piotr Orlowski, Piotr Szpryngier and Henryk Krawczyk
Faculty of Electronics, Telecommunications and Informatics, Gdansk University of Technology
11/12 Gabriela Narutowicza Street, Gdansk, Poland
Keywords:
Ontology, Set of basic concepts, Ontology learning.
Abstract:
Ontologies as entities representing individual point of view on surrounding world introduce heterogeneity
to knowledge representation. Common set of core concepts can introduce similarity big enough for further
interoperability between ontologies. In this paper an experiment is presented proving that despite differences
in detail ontologies stay similar in regard of core concepts. During the experiments NOIA methodology
enhanced by OCS methodology was used to create ontologies from three significantly different sources of
knowledge about risk management.
1 INTRODUCTION
Ontology creation is a complex task dependent on
methodology and a set of basic concepts. Ontologies
presenting different points of view limit interoperabil-
ity, making mapping or merging a tedious task.
To be usable by a wide range of recipients the
created ontology needs to represent a common view
of the described problem. Humans, however tend to
have a distinct way of perceiving the surrounding re-
ality. Different sets of basic concepts can be used and
utilized. Furthermore a common set of basic concepts
not always means a common set of basic definitions.
Even slight differences can lead to potentially differ-
ent ontologies. There are some upper ontologies pro-
posed (Niles and Pease, 2001) (Masolo et al., 2003)
but it’s highly unlikely that a global agreement will
be met upon a common set of concepts or the shape
of an ontology. Without such agreement upon basic
concepts and their definitions, interactions between
systems using different ontologies will be difficult -
a need for costly manual mapping arises.
The purpose of this paper is to test whether us-
ing distinct sets of definitions for chosen sets of basic
concepts can provide ontologies similar enough to in-
teroperate with each other. In other words, how the
choice of a knowledge source implies the final struc-
ture of the ontology.
Objectives for this test were as follow:
1. To choose the ontology domain and three different
sources of knowledge.
2. To build three ontologies using chosen knowledge
sources.
3. To evaluate prepared ontologies.
4. To compare result ontologies and conclude the re-
search.
The following section will present the initial as-
sumptions. Next, in section 3, methodology and
groupwork model used for ontology creation will be
described. In section 4 the basic set of concepts and
their definitions are described. In section 5 the pro-
cess of creating ontologies and achieved results are
presented. Section 6 shows achieved results.
2 INITIAL ASSUMPTIONS
2.1 Ontology Domain
Choice of a vague domain of concepts was needed to
allow use of more diversified knowledge sources. The
risk has many, often contrary, definitions i.e. (Waste,
2006) (Hall and Hulett, 2002) (Knight, 2002) and that
was the main reason of choosing it as the ontology
domain.
2.2 The Ontology Purpose and Scope
The prepared ontology has a strictly research purpose.
It should answer the question, what are the main rela-
364
Boinski T., Orlowski P., Szpryngier P. and Krawczyk H..
INFLUENCE AND SELECTION OF BASIC CONCEPTS ON ONTOLOGY DESIGN.
DOI: 10.5220/0003076103640369
In Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Ontology Development (KEOD-2010), pages 364-369
ISBN: 978-989-8425-29-4
Copyright
c
2010 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)
Figure 1: Process of creating new version of an ontology in OCS.
tions between the concepts of risk, threat, vulnerabil-
ity and asset. These terms appear in most risk defini-
tions.
2.3 Knowledge Sources
Basing on a search of the literature, three sources of
knowledge were chosen:
NIST Glossary of Key Information Security
Terms (Kissel, 2006),
ENISA Risk Management Glossary (Enisa,
2010),
Software Engineering, Ian Sommerville (Som-
merville, 2006).
Two of them are glossaries prepared by recog-
nized organizations: one American, NIST - National
Institute of Standards and Technology and one Eu-
ropean, ENISA - European Network and informa-
tion Security Agency. The third one is a recognized
software engineering university coursebook from The
United Kingdom, but it also contain definitions of
used terms. All are texts written in natural language
and describing security domains. NIST glossary con-
tains definitions used in USA and gives us a view to
terminology used in America. ENISA Glossary was
prepared for European Union Institutions and Mem-
ber States. Consequently it presents terminology used
in Europe and often utilises ISO (International Orga-
nization for Standardization) definitions. The book
written by Ian Sommerville presents risk terminology
in a more objective way, according to concepts used
by software engineers.
2.4 Used Groupwork Model and
Software
Ontologies have been created using a methodol-
ogy initially designed for Ontology Creation System
(OCS) (Boinski et al., 2009) developed by The De-
partment of Computer Architecture of Gdansk Uni-
versity of Technology. Opposed to methodology
available in Protegeeditor (Gennari et al., 2002) (Noy
et al., 2000) with Collaborative Protege (Tudorache
et al., 2008) extension, this methodology ensures that
the creator of the ontology will retain control over it.
Whereas Protege resolves conflicts by means of vot-
ing, OCS methodology always leaves the final word
to the ontology owner.
Any registered user can propose some changes in
any ontology. A privileged user, i.e. ontology creator
or an expert designated by him, can accept or reject
proposed changes. After that, a new version is created
and accepted changes are available for other develop-
ers. The whole process is showed in Figure 1. When
an ontology is public and its development is not re-
stricted in any way, the process of submitting propo-
sitions of changes can be combined with creating a
new version.
For the purpose of this paper we distinguish a se-
curity expert, who was assigned the role of an ontol-
ogy owner and all changes needed to be accepted by
him.
Table 1: Aggregated results of ontology comparison using
Falcon-OA (Jian et al., 2005).
ENISA NIST Sommerville
ENISA X 26 17
NIST 26 X 18
Sommerville 17 18 X
3 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
3.1 Ontology Learning
There are many methodologies of learning ontolo-
gies from natural text, for example (McGuiness and
INFLUENCE AND SELECTION OF BASIC CONCEPTS ON ONTOLOGY DESIGN
365
Table 2: Similarity between ENISA and NIST based ontologies.
No. Concept name Concept name Similarity
in ENISA in NIST
1 Group Group 1.0
2 Operation Operation 0.9989048162438352
3 Safeguard Safeguard 0.9984604434491676
4 Mission Mission 0.9979042801363289
5 Denial Of Services Denial Of Service 0.9900581108148236
6 Attack Attack 0.9805473496555192
7 Weakness Weakness 0.9641696140783707
8 Harm Harm 0.9203099356002691
9 Circumstance Circumstance 0.9177295789689781
10 Potential Potential 0.9140700859364972
11 Threat Threat 0.8307676361865943
12 Event Event 0.811927478336268
13 Modification Of Data Unauthorized Modification Of Data 0.8098784893405487
14 Implementation Error Implementation 0.797691170284476
15 Risk Risk 0.7695468416659597
16 Vulnerability Vulnerability 0.756619672104696
17 Procedure Security Procedure 0.7487199546707506
18 Application Major Application 0.7344763940853262
19 Control Security Control 0.713245540577225
20 Unauthorized Access Unauthorozed Access 0.7084168873642644
21 Destruction Unauthorized Destruction 0.7079624012576695
22 exploits exploits 0.999738325227409
23 isMemberOf isMemberOf 0.9994788690128461
24 hasMember hasMember 0.9992265192460275
25 causes causes 0.9898447200777993
26 isPotentialOf isPotentialThat 0.9075646311625767
27 hasPotentialToImpact hasPotentialTo 0.7669824888017037
Table 3: Similarity between ENISA and Sommerville based ontologies.
No. Concept name Concept name Similarity
in ENISA in Sommerville
1 Value Value 1.0
2 Weakness Weakness 0.9564709904052531
3 Potential Potential 0.9271158225611422
4 Harm Harm 0.9209783867451191
5 Circumstance Circumstance 0.9171607954808378
6 Attack Attack 0.8580363426992699
7 Control Control 0.8539265029954892
8 Asset Asset 0.8204264111517303
9 Computer system Computer Based System 0.7963994582890108
10 Information Resource Resource 0.7959453114871415
11 Threat Threat 0.7820141153736444
12 Event Event 0.7815727930842786
13 Risk Risk 0.758768058194784
14 Vulnerability Vulnerability 0.73883024261744
15 reduces reduces 0.9997731663396932
16 hasValue hasValue 0.9982319005180453
17 exploits canBeExploited 0.777640801540454
Noy, 2005) or (Fernandez et al., 1997). The modified
“Noy and McGuiness” approach was used here. Orig-
inal “Noy and McGuiness” Knowledge Engineering
Methodology consist of 7 steps:
1. To determine the domain and the scope.
2. To consider reusing of existing ontologies.
3. To enumerate important terms.
4. To define classes and class hierarchy.
5. To define properties of classes.
KEOD 2010 - International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Ontology Development
366
Table 4: Similarity between NIST and Sommerville based ontologies.
No. Concept name Concept name Similarity
in NIST in Sommerville
1 Potential Potential 1.0
2 Protective Measure Protective Measure 0.9997987609025334
3 Circumstance Circumstance 0.9997494477352709
4 Weakness Weakness 0.9995264158511349
5 Harm Harm 0.9988494092141691
6 Information System Vulnerability System Vulnerability 0.8857014523683819
7 Attack Attack 0.8825122910116765
8 Event Event 0.8683697978162398
9 Loss Of Information Loss 0.8139334750047373
10 Vulnerability Vulnerability 0.8110371584661011
11 Asset Asset 0.7870205803749836
12 System System 0.7637258019185644
13 Risk Risk 0.7144767829186948
14 Threat Threat 0.7110288987415302
15 concerns concerns 0.999822352134665
16 canBeExploited canBeExploited 0.9967319547095099
17 resultsFrom resultsIn 0.8593064400982773
18 exploits isExploitationOF 0.7494414710908577
6. To define properties restrictions.
7. To create instances.
Steps 2 and 7 were not performed. As the knowl-
edge source in step 3 we used 3 different documents.
Terms were taken from different definitions of Risk,
Threat, Vulnerability, Asset and Safeguard. Step 6
was extended by adding definitions to classes (to
change these classes into protege defined classes), ac-
cording to definitions found in glossaries. All steps
were enhanced by groupwork possibilities introduced
by OCS methodology.
3.2 Ontology Evaluation
Evaluation was performed with use of advice given
in (Staab and Studer, 2009). By evaluation we mean
verification and validation of our ontology. The veri-
fication answers the question “did we build ontology
in a correct way?”. The validation answers the ques-
tion “did we build the proper ontology?”. The follow-
ing quality criteria were considered during evaluation
phase:
accuracy - does the ontology present knowledge
given in knowledge source?
clarity - is the ontology understandable? is it doc-
umented?
completeness - does it cover the domain of inter-
est?
consistency - does it match the specification?
Chosen methodologies made both the ontology owner
and the participants responsible for the evaluation
of the ontology. OCS methodology required dou-
ble checking of created ontologies asking the afore-
mentioned questions multiple times - once by normal
users suggesting changes in ontology, and later by the
ontology owner during the process of changes accep-
tance. Using Protege and Pellet (the reasoner plug-
in used by Protege) provided the proper structure of
OWL file.
4 ACHIEVED RESULTS
Three ontologies were constructed. Their inferred
hirarchies are depicted on Figure 2. Final ontolo-
gies had different number of classes. ENISA based
ontology had 43 classes (Figure 2 a), Sommerville
based had 38 classes (Figure 2 b) and NIST based
had 71 classes (Figure 2 c). They were compared us-
ing Falcon-AO (Jian et al., 2005) Ontology Matching
tool. Falcon is based on linguistic matching for on-
tologies and uses promising (Euzenat and Shvaiko,
2007) graph modeling algorithms (GMO) with sup-
port of WordNet technology. Similarity of two enti-
ties from two ontologies comes from the combination
of similarities of involved statements (triples) taking
the two entities as the same role (subject, predicate,
object) in the triples, while the similarity of two state-
ments comes from the accumulation of similarities of
involved entities of the same role in the two state-
ments being compared (Hu et al., 2005). Compacted
results are presented in Table 1. Values in the table
represent the number of common concepts found in
ontologies based on knowledge sources designated by
INFLUENCE AND SELECTION OF BASIC CONCEPTS ON ONTOLOGY DESIGN
367
Figure 2: ENISA (a), Sommerville (b) and NIST (c) based ontology.
row and column.
Full results (Tables 2, 3 and 4) show that main
concepts are very similar. Differences occur mainly
in leaf classes differentiating ontologies in details
but not in main elements. Five core concepts (Risk,
Threat, Vulnerability, Asset and Safeguard), and some
other meaningful concepts, i.e. Attack, Weakness,
Event and Harm were found similar in over 70% of
all created ontologies.
5 CONCLUSIONS
Performed experiments show that despite differences
in details, ontologies proved to be similar in regard of
core concepts. Choosing a common set of basic enti-
ties enables users to design their own ontologies, yet
creating a common base for interoperability at execu-
tion time. With the introduction of semantic dictionar-
ies like WordNet (Fellbaum et al., 1998) such under-
takings became possible and widely accepted. Com-
mon sets of core concepts defined by such dictionaries
allow merging or mapping of ontologies on reasoning
KEOD 2010 - International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Ontology Development
368
time, using knowledge from both ontologies. Con-
cepts from chosen core sets are used as a bridge be-
tween those ontologies, opening new opportunities in
knowledge integration and creating new possibilities
when interoperating with other parties.
As a next step, research on ontology merging and
integration will be performed examining new possi-
bilities emerging from usage of a common set of core
concepts.
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