SCUBA: An Agent-Based Ontology Creation and Alignment Method for Socio-Cultural Modeling

An otherwise promising business, political, or military strategy can be crippled by an incomplete understanding of the social-cultural factors that define and influence a region. Such omissions are sometimes due to oversight, but often stem from a fundamental lack of understanding of how to model such difficult and unfamiliar concepts. The information required to generate useful contextual models is typically available but vast, and manual interpretation of detailed text is time-consuming, highly subjective, and requires specialized skills. The SCUBA project achieved a balanced human-computer modeling paradigm to 1) automate the creation of social and cultural ontologies from selected source materials using previously-developed tools, 2) apply a variety of nominal, semantic, structural, and statistical matching techniques to align multiple ontologies using an agentbased multimodel, and 3) evaluate the effectiveness of the generation and alignment processes using precision, recall, and various other measures of effectiveness. Preliminary results of our initial agent-based experiments were promising – by applying ensembles of multiple matching techniques, we achieved significant improvements in alignment F-scores and other measures of performance while dramatically reducing the amount of time required to manually produce coordinated, useful domain models. Keywords-ontology; ontology alignment; social ontology; cultural ontology; ensemble alignment; agent-based alignment