Disambiguation of Natural-language Terms in Business Semantics Engineering

De Leenheer, P. and de Moor, A. (2005) Context-driven Disambiguation in Ontology Elicitation. In Shvaiko P. & Euzenat J.,(eds.), Context and Ontologies: Theory, Practice and Applications, AAAI Technical Report WS-05-01 (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), AAAI Press, pp. 17–24.

Illustration of the two levels in DOGMA ontology: on the left -- the lexical level, lexons are elicited from various contexts. On the right, there is the conceptual level consisting of a concept definition server. The meaning ladder in between illustrates the articulation of lexical terms into concept definitions.

Ontologies represent rich semantics in a lexical way. Lexical labels are used to identify concepts and relationships, though there is no bijective mapping between them. Phenomenons such as synonyms and homonyms exemplify this, and can result in frustrating misunderstanding and ambiguity. In the elicitation and application of ontologies, the meaning of the ontological knowledge is dependent on the context. We consider the role of context in ontology elicitation by introducing context in a concept definition server for ontology representation. We also adopt other features of context found in literature, such as packaging of knowledge, aligning elements of different contexts, and reasoning about contexts. Finally, we illustrate context-driven ontology elicitation with a real world case study.

This paper was further extended in Journal of Data Semantics. See my related blog in this. In our business semantics management approach, disambiguation forms an important but difficult exercise during the consolidation activities.

Business Semantics for Trusted Regulatory Compliance: a Proposition

Ryan, H., Spyns, P., De Leenheer, P., and Leary, R. (2003) An Ontology-based Platform for Trusted Regulatory Compliance Services.In Proc. of the On The Move to Meaningful Internet Systems Workshops (OTM2003) (Catania, Sicily), LNCS 2889, Springer-Verlag, pp. 675-689.

This paper describes the shared objectives and planned collaborative venture to develop and deploy an ontology platform for trusted regulatory assurance and compliance certification services. The platform is based on extensions to the established DOGMA suite using legal domain-experts to develop and deliver the use cases. It is end-to-end, based on national and EU regulations, and will exploit multi-lingual representations, commitment rules, ontology management and reconciliation, intelligent agents and forensic tools. Evolution of the platform to a common integrated workbench for data privacy and digital rights controllers and for generic regulatory use is outlined.

The proposition introduced here  is based on our findings in previous projects (e.g., FFPoirot) and workshops (e.g., JURIX 2005) related to Legal Informatics and which were coordinated by us in the context of VUB STARLab.