EASING THE ONTOLOGY DEVELOPMENT
AND MAINTENANCE BURDEN FOR
SMALL GROUPS AND INDIVIDUALS
Roger Tagg, Harshad Lalwani and Raaj Srinivasan Kumaar
School of Computer and Information Science, University of South Australia, Mawson Lakes SA 5095, Australia
Keywords: Ontologies, Group Work Support, Personal Information Management.
Abstract: Most attempts to aid overworked knowledge workers by changing to a task focus depend on the provision of
computer support in categorizing incoming documents and messages. However such categorization
depends, in turn, on creating - and maintaining - a categorization scheme (taxonomy, lexicon or ontology)
for the user’s (or the group’s) work structure. This raises the problem that if users are suffering from
overload, they are unlikely to have the time or expertise to build and maintain an ontology – a task that is
recognized to be not a trivial one. This paper describes ongoing research into what options may exist to ease
the ontology management burden, and what are the advantages and problems with these options.
1 INTRODUCTION
In a paper at the last ICEIS CSAC workshop (Tagg,
2007), we described a number of studies carried out
by the authors’ research team, which addressed the
difficulties, faced by many knowledge workers, of
coping with an avalanche of unsorted and un-
prioritized input information from a variety of
sources and in a variety of applications and formats.
In that paper we described our approach as to re-
focus the user’s interface to a single "to do" list,
rather than multiple, disparate interfaces. We
proposed achieving this with the aid of a personal
ontology representing the user’s work structure.
We have developed an ontology editor that is
able to include “indicator strings”, i.e. text strings
which, if found in a document or message, indicate –
with a certain subjective probability – that this
document is relevant to a given ontology concept.
We are now prototyping an email categorization tool
that can take account of such relationships between
text and concepts.
However if such an approach is ever to make a
positive difference to the majority of real world
users, we have to ensure that the burden placed on
users to create and maintain their ontology –
including the indicator strings – is not too onerous.
This paper describes some investigations that we
have been recently undertaking into this last issue.
Section 2 reviews related work on approaches to
ontology creation and maintenance. Section 3
describes the actual experiments we have carried
out, and our comments on the results. Section 4
introduces a range of theoretical models which we
plan to test as the work proceeds. Section 5 contains
reflections on the work done so far, and Section 6
outlines the work that still remains to be done.
2 RELATED WORK
2.1 Text Mining and Content Analysis
Our intention was to base our automated assistance
to personal ontology creation on the text mining
software Leximancer (Smith, 2003), developed at
the University of Queensland. This tool “analyzes
the content of collections of textual documents and
displays a summary by means of a conceptual map
that represents the main concepts contained within
the text and how they are related”. It also has the
“ability to automatically and efficiently learn which
words predict which concepts”. Leximancer
incorporates algorithms for the learning of concepts
from frequent co-occurrences of words that appear
near to each other.
Commercial text mining or content analysis tools
are also available, such as Text Miner and Smart
Discovery. Common to this class of tools is an
orientation towards text appearing in the media (e.g.
295
Tagg R., Lalwani H. and Srinivasan Kumaar R. (2008).
EASING THE ONTOLOGY DEVELOPMENT AND MAINTENANCE BURDEN FOR SMALL GROUPS AND INDIVIDUALS.
In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, pages 295-300
DOI: 10.5220/0001729802950300
Copyright
c
 SciTePress

newspapers) and the objective of finding out what
the main themes of that text passage are.
Text mining has also been proposed as an
approach to creating and improving ontologies, e.g.
(Ditenbach et al., 2004) (Cimiano and Völker,
2005). However, although this is directly relevant to
our goals, there is not so much emphasis on
identifying those text strings that most reliably
suggest the relevance of an incoming document to
an ontology concept.
2.2 Semi-automatic Ontology
Generation
This is a research topic closely related to text
mining, but with ontology generation as the primary
purpose. A representative example of a tool is
OntoGen (Fortuna et al., 2005). This works through
a dialogue in which the user is presented with a
number of windows, which show the current concept
hierarchy, a diagram of the ontology, and
suggestions for further sub-concepts that is based on
occurrence statistics of related keywords. A
“grounding” module allows validation by testing
how certain test documents are classified by the
system compared with their classification by domain
experts.
Other work in this area is being done by Wang et
al (Wang et al., 2007) of the AIFB group at the U.
Karlsruhe, where a mixed approach is proposed,
blending the Text2Onto text miner with the KASO
manual ontology development tool.
2.3 Personal and Small Group
Ontologies
If ontologies are to be used by an individual or a
small group for categorizing documents and
messages, it may not be appropriate to use a
generalized ontology for the domains of interest.
The structure of the individual’s or group’s working
practices and objectives must also be included.
Standard ontologies could be imported, but they will
not in general reflect the full range or right balance
of user interests. Individuals may, for example, be
involved in multiple groups (Tagg, 2006).
OntoPIM (Lepouras et al., 2006) (Katifori et al.,
2006) is an example of a system geared to
individuals and small groups. It is clearly task-
oriented, and is part of the DELOS TIM project
(Catarci et al., 2007). The OntoPIM concept of
Semantic Save is effectively an automatic tagging of
input documents across many applications and file
formats. It includes a system for the mapping of the
values of significant attributes into standard tags.
However this system is further "downstream" than
our current concern, which is how to generate and
maintain the ontology in the first place.
3 WORK DONE AND IDEAS
DEVELOPED
3.1 Overall Architecture
The work described here is part of an overall project
entitled Virtual Private Secretary (VPS). The
motivation is to provide through software, for users
and groups that cannot afford a human PA (Personal
Assistant, or Secretary), some of a Secretary’s
functions in helping a boss or group to cope with a
heavy and diverse knowledge workload.
The overall architecture for the VPS project is
shown in Figure 1. It takes on board the concept of
many-to-many group membership (Tagg, 2006),
which recognizes that many users have to multi-task
work for multiple groups in the same time period.
Figure 1: A Conceptual Architecture for Ontology-
Assisted Categorization in the Virtual Private Secretary
Project.
We are using OWL as an ontology language,
using a drag-and-drop editor, EzOntoEdit, that we
have developed ourselves (Einig et al., 2006). Each
user is assumed to maintain a personal ontology of
the work themes that he or she is involved with. This
can include both topics of interest or aspects of the
user's work. The user is also influenced by the
ontologies of the groups to which he or she belongs,
as well as "best practice" in the domain of interest.
We have made the assumption (based on
informal discussions only at this stage) that a
knowledge worker may wish to categorize his/her
work into something like 5-8 major categories at any
one time, with 5-15 sub-categories within each main
category. This places on the user responsibility for
maintaining the top 2 layers of his or her ontology so
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as to correctly represent his/her current activity
structure.
However as we suspect that most users may have
neither the time nor the expertise to do this, we are
looking at two approaches (see 3.2 and 3.3 below) to
generating an ontology semi-automatically. A
further advantage of an automated approach is that it
could be run at given intervals (e.g. every 3 months)
or whenever the user indicates that the nature and
balance of his/her work has changed, thus helping
maintenance as well as creation.
3.2 Identification of a User’s Work
Categories through Text Analysis
In the first approach we have used Leximancer to
analyze the patterns of words and concepts in a
user’s email archives, a) where the archives have
been pre-categorized and b) where no categorization
has taken place and messages from all topics are
intermixed.
a) Pre-categorized Email Archives
Archives were saved from one academic’s Outlook
local folders into a set of text files. We ran
Leximancer separately for each sub-category of his
Teaching and Research categories. We then merged
the results onto a single spreadsheet for each major
category. Table 1 below shows part of the
spreadsheet for the Teaching category. The columns
represent the sub-categories. Only the top 20 words
for each sub-category were included.
Although Leximancer offers a default stop word
list, we decided to manually add to that list noise
words that we judged not to be good indicators of
the Teaching category; these are highlighted in
yellow. We re-ran the analysis and there was some
improvement, but a new set of noise words
appeared, which were again added to the stop word
list. We suspect that this process might have several
iterations, and were concerned that we might finish
up with different noise words for each major
category, but when we repeated the Leximancer
analysis for the Research category, only one word
was different.
b) Uncategorized (Mixed Topic) Email Archives
Leximancer offers a facility to propose Themes
(clusters) of concepts from an analysis of single text
document, so we have tried this on a mixed-topic
email inbox. The central part of the resultant map is
shown in Figure 2 below.
The circles represent suggested clusters, with the
concepts (in white) placed according to the closeness
of their co-occurrence. Associated tables are
available that show the actual co-occurrence
statistics of each concept and of the actual words in
the text.
Table 1: Partial Summary Spreadsheet for the Teaching Category.
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Figure 2: Concept Map Produced by Leximancer for a Sample of Uncategorized Emails.
While some clusters make sense for an IT
academic, e.g. students, project, research and
business, several others look less useful, e.g.
website, review, paper and exam. One would
naturally want to merge some of these, e.g. exam
with students, and review with research. Similarly,
one would almost certainly want to merge the
concepts project and projects which have been
mapped separately. This can be done using tools
within Leximancer, but the user would need to
understand these tools and to have the time to
intervene - something one wants to minimize.
The same problem would arise in asking the user
to decide which noise words should be excluded, for
example in Figure 2 the words people, e-mail and
website.
In our experiments, we first excluded the same set
of noise words as for Teaching and Research, but we
found we had to exclude more, to cater for the
additional major work categories such as
Administration. A separate noise word list for each
user seems undesirable, but there may have to be
different noise word lists for each different role or
profession. Our thoughts on a solution to this have
so far been limited to classing as stop words all
those with low Specificity (see 4.1 below).
3.3 Identification of a User’s Work
Categories through a Crawler
The second approach uses a crawler program to
mine the user’s current folder structures in various
places such as MyDocuments, Networked Drives
and Places, Outlook Local Folders, Web Browser
Bookmarks etc. A user's stored knowledge may be
highly distributed, including USB drives, shared
folders (e.g. MS Sharepoint folders containing
minutes of meetings with Actions on individuals -
these are often not read by the individuals!).
However the more varieties of structures that are
discovered, the more one has to reconcile possibly
clashing work structures. We have not yet carried
out trials with this approach.
3.4 Detection of Tasks
It has become clear in analyzing our results that
emails, for example, vary widely in the extent to
which they indicate a task or to-do for the user. We
have termed this factor taskiness. The approach we
have taken so far is to regard taskiness as an
additional ontology concept, and to associate with it
a set of text strings which (singly or in combination)
suggest taskiness. Examples (which we selected
manually from two users' archives) include please,
deadline, required by, at the latest, asap, earliest
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convenience, give me, send me, provide me, submit,
vote, Action.
However it has proved difficult, with this
approach, to separate important to-dos from hopeful
requests and invitations (e.g. to buy something or
take a questionnaire). Our analysis suggests that
strings such as names in the Sender and Subject
fields may be more significant.
Part of our taskiness detection method depends
on the appearance of dates and times in certain text
patterns. To this effect we have developed a program
incorporating regular expression logic. One issue
related to this, which we have yet to resolve, is
whether we should include relative date/time
expressions, e.g. next Tuesday, next January.
3.5 Identification of Task Instances
In the previous paper (Tagg, 2007) we discussed the
need to recognize, and store in the to-do
information, the names that identify business cases
for detected tasks. One task we are currently looking
at is how users of a semi-automated tool can be
aided in nominating, for example, the source
database tables – and columns - where these names
can be looked up.
3.6 Identifying Other Priority Factors
for the User’s To-Do List
Besides the use of text mining to feed an ontology
and to detect taskiness, other factors need to be
considered when setting up a system for generating a
to-do list. These include the expected duration and
complexity of an identified task; a user may have a
limited time window in which to address his/her to-
do list, and he/she may wish to give priority to tasks
that can be completed quickly and easily. This
would mean extending the ontology to include
known task types and their attributes, possibly with
some knowledge of inter-task dependencies.
4 THEORETICAL MODELS
4.1 With no Pre-categorization
The theory underlying Leximancer seems suitable
for our purpose, although it is recommended that
some degree of seeding of the concepts is often
required. Leximancer does cater for stop words –
although as with seeding, some expertise is needed
to choose a suitable list.
Some commonly occurring words and phrases
appear in most documents, and their appearances are
therefore of lower value in deciding to what
category a document belongs. To try and reduce the
noise, we plan to append to the stop word list any
word that has too low a measure which we call
Specificity.
Our simplistic Specificity percentage is defined
as:100 x {1 – Ni / T}, where Ni is the number of
messages/documents that word i appears in, and T is
the total number of messages/documents. This
measure, although extremely coarse, we believe to
be adequate as long as the categories are fairly
evenly balanced – unlike if, for example, 90% of the
messages belong to one category.
4.2 Categories have been Proposed, but
without any Training Sets
This case is where we have a set of concepts,
whether from Leximancer, from a crawler, or from a
manual process. But we also need to know which
words indicate which concept, and the probabilities.
Leximancer can tell us which words were included
in its proposed concepts, but without probabilities.
4.3 Pre-categorized Training Sets
This is the simplest situation. For each training set j
(which is specific to a category or sub-category) we
record the count of times a word i appears as Nij. A
word's Local Density is then Nij / Lj where Lj is the
total length of the training set j (in lines or
characters).
The Discrimination Value of a word i to indicate
category j can be measured as the ratio of the Local
Density for j to the Global Density Ni / L across all
training sets. If a word appears no more often in the
training set than in the whole collection, then the
ratio is 1 or less, so the word does not have much
value. If it appears twice (or more) as often, then it
could be seelcted as an “indicator string”.
5 REFLECTIONS
In discussions both within and outside the team it
has become clear that the example ontology we have
been using does not strictly differentiate is-a and
part-of relationships. It may be that a part-of
hierarchy is more appropriate to a user's work
structure. However the graphical aspects of our
ontology editor only represent is-a relationships - the
rest have to be entered through property sheets. We
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have been attempting to develop additional graphical
support for part-of and process inter-dependency
relationships, but the resulting interface may be too
complex for our intended users.
A continuing obstacle in our work so far has
been the density of noise words in our text archives.
These skew the automatic analysis, and adding them
to the stop word list often does little more than
throw up a new set of noise words in the next
iteration. The danger in this process is that what is
noise to one user may be significant to another, and
every user is forced to maintain his or her individual
stop word list.
A full ontology approach may not in fact be the
best solution. We only need to maintain a small and
relatively simple structure of a person’s work.
However the need remains to make it easy for the
user to set up and maintain his/her work structure
and means of recognizing context.
Additionally, for any solution to gain wide
acceptance by users, issues of adoption and diffusion
of software tools are critical. To stand any chance of
adoption, a tool has to relieve the user’s overload -
rather than add yet another straw to the camel’s
back.
6 FUTURE WORK
We are continuing to test our theories and ideas on
further collections of documents and email archives.
Up to now we have only looked at email archives
from one or two persons. Looking at more may
impose ethical issues such as confidentiality.
Five particular areas of planned future work with
our current investigations are:
a) Test how seriously the appearance of
repeated original messages in email
archives affects categorization;
b) Test different cut-off levels of specificity
when classing words as stopwords;
c) Test concept sets determined by a crawler
approach, including learning how we might
align different ontologies that are suggested
by different parts of a user’s folder
structures (e.g. bookmarks);
d) Develop an approach to using available
data that relates proper names appearing in
text to the user's work structure;
e) Develop a user-friendly wizard that leads
the user through a variety of tools that help
the ontology and lexicon construction and
maintenance.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We would like to thank Paul Swatman (U of South
Australia), Gerhard Schwabe (U of Zürich) and
Wolfgang Maass (U of Furtwangen, Germany) for
their helpful feedback; and Bharat Mordiya,
Jayeshkumar Parmar and Sudarshan Patel for their
work on the lexical and process extensions to the
EzOntoEdit ontology editor.
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