Solving Poverty using Ontology

Zarmeen Nasim and Imran Khan

Institute of Business Administration, Karachi, Pakistan

Keywords:

Ontology, Problem Solving.

Abstract:

This paper presents an ontology-based approach to address poverty. Poverty has been one of the serious

societal problems that the world is facing in recent times. The approach has been modeled in such a way that

it can be used to solve any other wicked problem of the society as well including corruption, bad governance,

trafﬁc management, poor education and many others. The causes of the said problem were modeled at different

level of granularity. The proposed model also incorporates various different ways of addressing poverty by

addressing possible causes of poverty. The presented scheme of using an ontology to address the wicked

problem has the inferencing capability also to infer the indirect causes of poverty.

1 INTRODUCTION

The World Bank Organization describes poverty in

this way:

”Poverty is hunger. Poverty is lack of shelter.

Poverty is being sick and not being able to see a doc-

tor. Poverty is not having access to school and not

knowing how to read. Poverty is not having a job, is

fear for the future, living one day at a time.

Poverty has many faces, changing from place to

place and across time, and has been described in

many ways. Most often, poverty is a situation peo-

ple want to escape. So poverty is a call to action –

for the poor and the wealthy alike – a call to change

the world so that many more may have enough to eat,

adequate shelter, access to education and health, pro-

tection from violence, and a voice in what happens in

their communities.”

The problem of Poverty is well known across the

globe. Every country is facing this issue. However,

the extent to which poverty prevails in the society is

different in different parts of the globe. There is no

one ultimate cause of poverty. The cause of poverty

varies from location to location. Living a poor life

in USA is different from the life of poverty in a third

world country such as Pakistan or Bangladesh.

We believe that in order to address the issue of

poverty, we need to model poverty as a system of

causes and possible solutions to these causes. This

paper describes our systematic approach based on On-

tology, developed to address the causes of poverty.

The causes which have been considered in this paper

are based on our observation of livelihood in Pakistan.

There are different measures to capture the

poverty in a country. The most commonly used mea-

sure is a Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI). The

multidimensional poverty index is used to measure

the severe deprivations that the individual experiences

with respect to the living standard, education and

health services. Multiple variables are used to cap-

ture the quality of education, health and standard of

living in a country.

According to the survey report on Multidimen-

sional poverty published by the ministry of planning,

development and reform in Pakistan

, the multidi-

mensional poverty index of Pakistan is 0.197. The

MPI showed that the 38.8% of the population of Pak-

istan is poor. The statistics mentioned in the report

showed that the proportion of poor people living in ur-

ban areas is signiﬁcantly lower than the ratio of poor

people living in rural areas of Pakistan. Education de-

privation in Pakistan made the greatest contribution

to national poverty, followed by living standards and

health services deprivation.

The main contributions of this research are as fol-

lows:

1. The development of an ontology aiming to model

wicked problems.

2. The instantiation of the developed ontology to

capture the global issue of Poverty.

http://www.pk.undp.org/content/pakistan/en/home/libr

ary/hiv aids/Multidimensional-Poverty-in-Pakistan.html

Nasim, Z. and Khan, I.

Solving Poverty using Ontology.

DOI: 10.5220/0006944102710278

In Proceedings of the 10th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (IC3K 2018) - Volume 2: KEOD, pages 271-278

ISBN: 978-989-758-330-8

271

This paper presents the ontological solution to ad-

dress the issue of poverty. The ways presented in

this paper are further discussed in the Discussion sec-

tion using the leverage points proposed by Donella H.

Meadows (Meadows et al., 1997). Donella H. Mead-

ows discussed leverage points to intervene in a sys-

tem. Nine different leverage points were presented

which are as follows:

1. Numbers (Subsidies, Taxes, Stan-

dards):Numbers were considered as the least

important leverage point.

2. Material Stocks and Flows: The stocks and

ﬂows effect the system operations.

3. Regulating Negative Feedback Loops: Negative

feedback loops are an important leverage point.

Systems’ performance can be improved by regu-

lating negative feedback loops.

4. Driving Positive Feedback Loops: Positive

feedback loops determine development and de-

structions in systems.

5. Information Flows: The information ﬂow in the

system can be considered as another important

leverage point for the policy makers and company

strategist. It is important to identify the missing

information correctly at the right time.

6. The Rules of the System: Rules of the system

includes incentives and constraints applied to the

system. If someone wants to understand the mal-

functions of systems, then he should try to identify

where in the system some rule is broken.

7. The Power of Self-organization: Self-

organization refers to the change in any aspect of

a system lower on this list, such as addition or

removal of the new physical structure, adding or

deleting negative or positive loops or information

ﬂows or rules.

8. The Goals of the System: The goal of the system

is an important leverage point. As everything on

this list is forced to conform to system goals.

9. The Mindset or Paradigm out of which

the Goals, Rules, Feedback Structure Arise:

Paradigms are the bases of systems. Goals, in-

formation ﬂows, feedbacks, stocks, ﬂows emerge

from the paradigm. People who manage to in-

tervene in systems at the level of paradigm hit a

leverage point that completely changes systems.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Sec-

tion 2 describes the related work. Section 3 deﬁnes

poverty as the wicked societal problem and the char-

acteristics of the wicked problem. Section 4 presents

the methodology. Section 5 includes the discussion

and ﬁnally, Section 6 concludes this paper.

2 RELATED WORK

The literature review section is subdivided into two

subsections. In the ﬁrst subsection, we described the

application of ontology. In the second subsection, the

approaches proposed for addressing poverty are de-

scribed.

2.1 Ontology

The use of ontology to model complex systems

has been widely studied in literature. This sec-

tion presents the brief overview of the work done

on ontology by various researchers. L.C Van Rui-

jven (Van Ruijven, 2013) discussed the interoperabil-

ity issues faced in capital facilities industry due to

the highly distributed nature of such industries. It

was highlighted that the lack of proper communica-

tion and inadequate exchange of information within

projects were the main reason of project failure. An

ontology-based approach was proposed for managing

various industrial processes. The proposed ontology

is currently used in major infrastructure projects in

the Netherlands. The ontology was based on the sim-

pliﬁcation of ISO 15926. The implementation of the

presented ontology was done using the information

management tool Relatics.

H.J Happel (Happel and Seedorf, 2006) discussed

various applications of ontologies in software engi-

neering. The paper presented a framework for clas-

sifying usage of ontologies in software engineering.

The concrete approaches for using ontology in the

software engineering life cycle was discussed. The

use of ontology in each phase of development cycle

improves the communication and information man-

agement. It enables developers to share a common

vocabulary for communication.

Eric C. Honour (Honour and Valerdi, 2006) dis-

cussed the need for ontology in designing systems.

An ongoing project Systems Engineering Return on

Investment (SE-ROI) aims to collect empirical infor-

mation to understand how systems engineering meth-

ods relate to program success (cost, schedule, and

technical terms). The purpose of the project is to con-

vert ontology into a methodology for measure return

on investment of software engineering projects. The

paper highlighted the fact that one of the greatest chal-

lenges in quantifying systems engineering is the lack

of a shared conceptualization. The challenge can be

overcome through the use of well-deﬁned ontology

for software systems.

Jonathan DiLeo et al. (DiLeo et al., 2006) ex-

tended the approach developed earlier for analyzing,

designing, and developing multiagent systems, called

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272

Multiagent Systems Engineering (MaSE). The pre-

sented approach extends MaSE to include the use

of ontologies for information domain speciﬁcation.

The authors highlighted the fact that though many

methodologies have been developed for engineering

multi-agent systems, however, these approaches do

not sufﬁciently address the need of information do-

main system. The extensions allow the designer to

specify information ﬂow by using objects from the

ontology as parameters in agent conversations. The

ontologies were used to specify the information do-

main of a multiagent system. The agents in the sys-

tem interact by passing messages and these messages

frequently involve passing parameters.

Humberto L. O. Dalpra et al. (Dalpra et al., 2015)

proposed an approach based on ontology for the soft-

ware process improvement. The paper discussed that

the process improvement can be achieved by analyz-

ing process data execution with an approach called

PROV-Process, which uses a layer for storing pro-

cess provenance and an ontology based on PROV-O.

The use of ontology enables software engineering to

detect the activities that inﬂuenced the generation of

other activities. Furthermore, we can identify agents

that could be associated with the solution of the de-

ployment task, considering that they already handled

the artifacts involved in this task in any other execu-

tion of the process.

Kohli et. al(Kohli et al., 2012) presented the on-

tology of slums for classifying images. They pro-

posed an ontological framework to analyze and clas-

sify slums. The ontology contained well-deﬁned

terms that can be used to understand the relationship

between image and slum characteristics.

2.2 Poverty

Rodr

ıguez-Pose et al. (Rodr

ıguez-Pose and Hardy,

2015) addressed the problem of poverty using rural

development methodology. The political, social and

economic changes to rural areas impact the rural de-

velopment. Their research suggested that the agricul-

tural and non-agricultural development methods can

be used to alleviate the problem of poverty.

Yang Zhou et. al (Zhou et al., 2018) studied the

problem of poverty in China. The research studied

the impact of land policy innovations in alleviating

poverty from China. Another study on rural poverty

in China was conducted by Yansui Liu (Liu et al.,

2017). The study examined the spatial distribution

characteristics of poverty in rural China.

Abdul Hameed et. al (Hameed et al., 2016) pre-

sented their study on poverty in Pakistan. According

to this study, 59% population of Pakistan is poor. The

author suggested that the rural poverty can be elim-

inated through education, improved living standards,

and income growth.

Sajid Pervez (Pervez, 2016) described the role of

education in addressing poverty. Their results showed

that the education has a signiﬁcant impact on improv-

ing the employment status of people which helps in

reducing poverty from the country.

Alvarez et. al (Alvarez et al., 2015) discussed

ﬁve major ways of poverty alleviation which includes

micro-ﬁnance, social entrepreneurship, foreign aid,

the base of the pyramid initiatives and the property

rights. Each of these measures was critically reviewed

and limitations were identiﬁed. Despite these ﬁve ma-

jors, their paper concluded that international industri-

alization can have a far more promising impact on the

poverty alleviation.

3 POVERTY - WICKED

PROBLEM

Rittel et al. (Rittel and Webber, 1973) discussed cer-

tain characteristics of wicked problem. The paper dis-

cussed that most of the real-life problems are wicked

problems, unlike the problems we study in various

domains such as mathematics, physics and science

and engineering. Wicked problems are the problems

which are poorly deﬁned. The paper explained vari-

ous characteristics of such problems which are as fol-

lows:

i The fundamental property of wicked problems is

that there is no complete formulation possible for

such problems. We are unable to propose a for-

mulation that covers all the variables or factors

impacting a wicked problem.

ii Wicked problems have no stopping rule because

there is no criteria for sufﬁciently understanding

the underlying problem. Usually, people stopped

working on such problems not because the work

gets completed but because either the resources

get exhausted or the solution obtained so far is

sufﬁcient for the time being.

iii There are no right or wrong solutions to wicked

problems, rather we compare the quality of var-

ious different solutions of wicked problems with

each other to decide which one to adopt.

iv Another property of wicked problem is that there

is no immediate or ultimate test of a solution

to wicked problems. Once implemented, conse-

quences can be seen over the period of time.

v With wicked problems planning, every solution

which gets implemented have a consequence on

Solving Poverty using Ontology

273

the society. A cost is involved; therefore, a criti-

cal analysis of the solution and the possible con-

sequences is required before the solution gets im-

plemented.

vi Wicked problems don’t have a clearly deﬁned list

of all possible solutions

vii Every wicked problem has a distinguishing char-

acteristic which implies that the solution to one

wicked problem cannot be applied to another

problem.

viii A wicked problem can be considered as a cause

of another wicked problem. We can consider

a wicked problem as a network of subproblems

which also possess the attributes of a wicked

problem.

ix Wicked problems can be explained using numer-

ous ways. The explanation determines the nature

of the proposed solution.

In the light of attributes of a wicked problem dis-

cussed above, the issue of poverty can be modeled as

a wicked problem. We are unable to formalize all the

social variables causing poverty. The reason of this

incomplete formalization is due to the cultural depen-

dency of poverty on various social attributes. This

leads to consider poverty as a wicked problem. More-

over, there can be various ways to address poverty.

However, there is no perfect solution so far to com-

plete eradicate poverty. We can model poverty as a

network of other subproblems. This will be discussed

in detail in the next section.

4 METHODOLOGY

This section describes the ontology-based approach

of modeling poverty. Though the approach discussed

here is implemented the problem of Poverty, however,

it can be adopted to address any wicked problem.

Figure 1 describes the root causes of poverty. It

was identiﬁed that the root causes also have various

sub-causes. Unemployment has various sub-causes

expanded on level 3 and level 4 as shown in Figure

After the identiﬁcation of various causes and sub-

causes of Poverty, ontology of Poverty was con-

structed. Protege was used to construct the ontology.

4.1 Classes

Following classes are deﬁned in the proposed ontol-

ogy.

Figure 1: Level 1 and Level 2 causes of Poverty.

Figure 2: Causes network of Unemployment.

1. Problem: The class problem represents the con-

cept of any wicked problem.

2. Solution: The class solution represents the con-

cept of the solutions to a wicked problem.

4.2 Instances

4.2.1 Instances of Problem

Following instances are deﬁned for class Problem in

the proposed ontology.

i Absence of Vocational Training Institutes: It

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274

Figure 3: Ontology.

has been observed that there is a lack of voca-

tional training institutes in Pakistan. The lack of

vocational training institutes leads to lack of job

opportunities.

ii Economic Situation: The economic situation

refers to the economic growth of the country. Eco-

nomic growth of the country greatly inﬂuences

the poverty ratio. In the proposed ontology, we

considered economic situation as a direct cause

of poverty.

iii Export/Import Imbalance: The import/export

imbalance occurs when the ratio of export is sig-

niﬁcantly less than the ratio of import. This is

considered as a sub-cause of economic situation.

If export to import ratio is good then the economic

growth will rise, which eventually help us in re-

ducing poverty.

iv Improper Hiring: Improper hiring mechanism

of teachers at primary/secondary level of educa-

tion degrades the quality of education. Due to

the low quality education, youth face difﬁculty

in ceasing potential job opportunities. This leads

to increase in unemployment ratio which rise the

poverty ratio in a country.

v Improper Planning of Human Resource: Un-

like developed countries, there is no proper plan-

ning department for managing large population

in under developed countries. Due to the un-

planned growth in population, poverty level rises

in a country.

vi Incapable Authorities: Due to the incapability

of authorities, the natural resources are not uti-

lized properly for the creation of new job oppor-

tunities. This causes increase in poverty.

vii Incapable Teachers: It has been observed that

the incapable teachers are one of the cause of sub

standard education in Pakistan.

viii Lack of Government Support: At the govern-

ment level, there is no support for the startups in

terms of tax relaxation and funding. This causes

lack of startups in Pakistan.

ix Lack of Job Opportunities: One of the major

cause of unemployment is the lack of job oppor-

tunities.

x Lack of Startups: Lack of job opportunities is

due to the lack of startups. The increase in num-

ber of startups will provide job opportunities to

the youth which will help in addressing unem-

ployment.

xi Large Population: The unplanned growth in

population is one of the major cause of poverty.

xii Law and Order Situation: Law and order situ-

ation has the direct impact on the business of the

country. If the situation is good, then investors

will be willing to invest in small businesses/ star-

tups.

xiii Poor planning of Natural Resources: Natural

resources are the wealth of any country. The

proper utilization of these resources can bring

prosperity to the country which ultimately helps

in reducing the poverty from the country.

xiv Poverty: Poverty is one of the major problem of

the third world countries such as Pakistan.

xv Substandard Education: Substandard education

refers to the poor quality of education being pro-

vided to the youth of the country. It is one of the

major cause of unemployment in the country.

xvi Unaffordable Education: The high quality ed-

ucation is too expensive for the common man of

the country.

xvii Unemployment: Unemployment is one of the di-

rect cause of poverty.

Solving Poverty using Ontology

275

4.2.2 Instances of Solution

Following instances are deﬁned for class Solution in

the proposed ontology.

i Awareness: Making general public aware of the

new job opportunities, vocational and develop-

ment programs will help in addressing poverty.

ii Support of Donors: The problem of lack of star-

tups due to funding issues can be addressed if the

ﬁnancial support can be attained from the donor

organizations.

iii Government Support: If government provides

support to small startups in terms of taxation then

this will encourage people to start small business

which will ultimately help in reducing unemploy-

ment.

iv Industries: To solve the problem of ex-

port/import imbalance, new industries need to be

established.

v Personality Development and Training: If we

have more capable teachers then the quality of

education can be improved. If teachers are pro-

vided with personality development and training

programs, they can grow professionally.

vi Proper Planning: Proper planning for utilizing

natural resources for the prosperity of the country

will solve the problem of poor planning of natural

resources.

vii Vocational Training: Vocational training insti-

tutes can help in developing skills in the youth so

that the can ﬁnd job according to their skill set.

This will help in reducing unemployment in the

country.

4.3 Object Properties

To connect problems with solutions, following object

properties were deﬁned in the proposed ontology.

1. Caused by: The domain of caused by is the in-

stance of problem and the range is also an instance

of problem. For e.g poverty is caused by unem-

ployment

2. Solved by: The domain of solved by is the in-

stance of problem and the range is an instance

of solution. For e.g lack of startup is solved by

donors support

3. Cause: This is the inverse of caused by property.

For e.g unemployment cause poverty

4.4 Data Properties

Data properties are the attributes of the classes. Fol-

lowing data properties were deﬁned in the proposed

ontology.

1. Description: This deﬁnes the description of prob-

lem. The domain is the instance of problem and

range is the string.

2. Level: It is used to represent the level of the prob-

lem. The domain is the instance of problem and

range is the integer. For e.g Poverty is assigned

level 0 and all the primary causes of poverty are

assigned level 1.

Figure 3 presents proposed ontology of the poverty.

Figure 4: Reasoning through proposed Ontology.

4.5 Reasoning

Reasoning is one of the very powerful feature of on-

tology. Reasoning enabled us to understand the rela-

tionship between various causes of poverty at differ-

ent level of granularities. As described in Section IV

that the symptoms of wicked problem are related to

each other, with reasoning we were able to identify

these relationships.

Figure 4 shows that the proposed methodology in-

ferred that the cause Improper Hiring also causes Sub-

standard Education, Unemployment and Poverty. The

inferencing was based on the transitivity of cause and

caused by properties. The instance Unemployment is

the upper level Level1 cause of Poverty where as Sub-

standard Education was deﬁned as the cause of Un-

employment. Further, Improper Hiring is related to

Substandard Education through cause property.

The reasoning engine inferred that since Sub-

standard Education cause Unemployment and Un-

employment cause Poverty therefore, the instance

Improper Hiring is related to Unemployment and

Poverty through cause relationship.

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5 DISCUSSION

This section discussed the ﬁndings of our research

work as follows

1. The modeling of a wicked problem poverty help

us in understanding the various different causes

of the root problem and the solutions. Also we

were able to model the relationship between these

causes and solutions at different level of granular-

ities.

2. The ontology helps us in understanding the holis-

tic view of the problem. The reasoning capability

of the proposed ontology also help us in under-

standing how the causes are indirectly related to

each other. For example, causes with level num-

ber 3 such as Improper Hiring mechanism are in-

directly impacting the causes with level less than

To the best of our knowledge, this is the ﬁrst attempt

of modeling poverty using ontology as a modeling

tool. As discussed in the literature review section,

people have performed economic studies on the issue

of poverty.

The leverage points presented in Section I can be

used to evaluate the effectiveness of various different

solutions proposed in this paper for poverty. Below is

the description of each of the leverage point that can

be applied on the solutions proposed above.

1. Numbers: By increasing the number of industries

and vocational training institutes, we can address

unemployment which will ultimately help in re-

ducing the poverty.

2. Information Flows: This is the responsibility of

policy makers to collect population statistics re-

garding poverty such as ratio of population having

access to clean water, food, shelter and education.

3. The Goals of the System: In order to reduce

poverty in a systematic manner, short term and

long term goals can be established to evaluate the

performance of working bodies.

4. The Mindset: The mindset of people can be

improved by spreading awareness regarding the

poverty and the efforts made to eradicate it. Per-

sonality development and training of teachers can

also help in improving the quality of education.

By improving the quality of education, we can re-

duce poverty.

The leverage points discussed above will help in

improving the quality of proposed solutions and this

will ultimately help in the eradication of poverty from

the society.

6 CONCLUSION

This research discusses the ontology-based model of

poverty where we have shown the relationship be-

tween poverty and its causes. The causes were ar-

ranged at the different level of granularity. The pro-

posed ontology also incorporates the ways through

which we can address the issue poverty.

This paper presented the ontological approach to

model the problem of poverty. The proposed ap-

proach can help us in modeling any wicked problem.

The beneﬁt of using ontology-based approach over

other traditional modeling approaches such as Uni-

ﬁed Modeling Language(UML) and Entity relation-

ship diagram (ERD) is the reasoning capability of on-

tology. Through reasoning, we can infer useful in-

sights on the ontology-based model. Reasoning en-

abled us to understand the interrelationships between

various causes of poverty. This understanding can

help us to prioritize our solutions while addressing

these causes. Furthermore, the solutions proposed for

poverty alleviation were analyzed using the leverage

points proposed by Meadows (Meadows et al., 1997).

In the future, the work can be extended further to en-

rich the ontology with more details by incorporating

other relationships.

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