Semi-automatic Ontology Construction based on Patterns

This thesis aims to improve the ontology engineering process, by providingbetter semi-automatic support for constructing ontologies and introducingknowledge reuse through ontology patterns. The thesis introduces a ty-pology of patterns, a general framework of pattern-based semi-automaticontology construction called OntoCase, and provides a set of methods tosolve some specific tasks within this framework. Experimental results indi-cate some benefits and drawbacks of both ontology patterns, in general, andsemi-automatic ontology engineering using patterns, the OntoCase frame-work, in particular.The general setting of this thesis is the field of information logistics,which focuses on how to provide the right information at the right momentin time to the right person or organisation, sent through the right medium.The thesis focuses on constructing enterprise ontologies to be used for struc-turing and retrieving information related to a certain enterprise. This meansthat the ontologies are quite ’light weight’ in terms of logical complexity andexpressiveness.Applying ontology content design patterns within semi-automatic ontol-ogy construction, i.e. ontology learning, is a novel approach. The main con-tributions of this thesis are a typology of patterns together with a patterncatalogue, an overall framework for semi-automatic pattern-based ontol-ogy construction, specific methods for solving partial problems within thisframework, and evaluation results showing the characteristics of ontologiesconstructed semi-automatically based on patterns. Results show that it ispossible to improve the results of typical existing ontology learning methodsby selecting and reusing patterns. OntoCase is able to introduce a generaltop-structure to the ontologies, and by exploiting background knowledge,the ontology is given a richer structure than when patterns are not applied.