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The Transition from Transactions to ConnectionsVirtually everywhere one looks we are in the midst of a transition for how we organize and manage information, indeed even relationships. Social networks and online communities are changing how we live and interact. NoSQL and graph databases — married to their near cousin Big Data — are changing how we organize and store information and data. Semantic technologies, backed by their ontologies and RDF data model, are showing the way for how we can connect and interoperate disparate information in ways only dreamed about a decade ago. And all of this, of course, is being built upon the infrastructure of the Internet and the Web, a global, distributed network of devices and information that is undoubtedly one of the most important technological developments in human history.
There is a shared structure across all of these developments — the graph. Graphs are proving to be the new universal paradigm for how we organize and manage information. Graphs have an inherently expandable nature, and one which can also capture any existing structure. So, as we see all of the networks, connections, relationships and links — both physical and informational — grow around us, it is useful to step back a bit and contemplate the universal graph structure at the core of these developments.
Understanding that we now live in the Age of the Graph means we can begin studying and using the concept of the graph itself to better analyze and manage our interconnected world. Whether we are trying to understand the physical networks of supply chains and infrastructure or the information relationships within ontologies or knowledge graphs, the various concepts underlying graphs and graph theory, themselves expressed through a rich vocabulary of terms, provide the keys for unlocking still further treasures hidden in the structure of graphs.
The use of “graph” as a mathematical concept is not much more than 100 years old. The beginning explication of the various classes of problems that can be addressed by graph theory probably is no older than 300 years. The use of graphs for expressing logic structures probably is not much older than 100 years, with the intellectual roots beginning with Charles Sanders Peirce [1]. Though likely trade routes and their affiliated roads and primitive transportation or nomadic infrastructures were perhaps the first expressions of physical networks, the emergence and prevalence of networks is a fairly recent phenomenon. The Internet and the Web are surely the catalyzing development that has brought graphs and networks to the forefront.
In mathematics, a graph is an abstract representation of a set of objects where pairs of the objects are connected. The objects are most often known as nodes or vertices; the connections between the objects are called edges. Typically, a graph is depicted in diagrammatic form as a set of dots or bubbles for the nodes, joined by lines or curves for the edges. If there is a logical relationship between connected nodes the edge is directed, and the graph is known as a directed graph. Various structures or topologies can be expressed through this conceptual graph framework. Graphs are one of the principle focuses of study in discrete mathematics [2]. The word “graph” was first used in the sense as a mathematical structure by J.J. Sylvester in 1878 [3].
As representative of various data models, particularly in our company’s own interests in the Resource Description Framework (RDF) model, the nodes can represent “nouns” or subjects or objects (depending on the direction of the links) or attributes. The edges or connections represent “verbs” or relationships, properties or predicates. Thus, the simple “triple” of the basic statement in RDF (consisting of subject – predicate – object) is one of the constituent barbells that make up what becomes the eventual graph structure.
The manipulation and analysis of graph structures comes under the rubric of graph theory. The first recognized paper in that field is the Seven Bridges of Königsberg, written by Leonhard Euler in 1736. The objective of the paper was to find a walking path through the city that would cross each bridge once and only once. Euler proved that the problem has no solution:
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Euler’s approach represented the path problem as a graph, by treating the land masses as nodes and the bridges as edges. Euler’s proof postulated that if every bridge has been traversed exactly once, it follows that, for each land mass (except for the ones chosen for the start and finish), the number of bridges touching that land mass must be even (the number of connections to a node we now call “degree”). Since that is not true for this instance, there is no solution. Other researchers, including Leibniz, Cauchy and L’Huillier applied this approach to similar problems, leading to the origin of the field of topology.
Later, Cayley broadened the approach to study tree structures, which have many implications in theoretical chemistry. By the 20th century, the fusion of ideas coming from mathematics with those coming from chemistry formed the origin of much of the standard terminology of graph theory.
Graph theory forms the core of network science, the applied study of graph structures and networks. Besides graph theory, the field draws on methods including statistical mechanics from physics, data mining and information visualization from computer science, inferential modeling from statistics, and social structure from sociology. Classical problems embraced by this realm include the four color problem of maps, the traveling salesman problem, and the six degrees of Kevin Bacon.
Graph theory and network science are the suitable disciplines for a variety of information structures and many additional classes of problems. This table lists many of these applicable areas, most with links to still further information from Wikipedia:
Graphs are among the most ubiquitous models of both natural and human-made structures. They can be used to model many types of relations and process dynamics in physical, biological and social systems. Many problems of practical interest can be represented by graphs. This breadth of applicability makes network science and graph theory two of the most critical analytical areas for study and breakthroughs for the foreseeable future. I touch on this more in the concluding section.
Surely the first examples of graph structures were early trade and nomadic routes. Here, for example, are the trade routes of the Radhanites dating from about 870 AD [4]:
It is not surprising that routes such as these, or other physical networks as exemplified by the bridges of Königsberg, were the stimulus for early mathematics and analysis related to efficient use of networks. Minimizing the time to complete a trade circuit or visiting multiple markets efficiently has clear benefits. These economic rationales apply to a wide variety of modern, physical networks, including:
Of course, included in the latter category is the Internet itself. It is the largest graph in existence, with an estimated 2.2 billion users and their devices all connected in one way or another in all parts of the globe [5].
Graphs and graph theory also have broad applicability to natural systems. For example, graph theory is used extensively to study molecular structures in chemistry and physics. A graph makes a natural model for a molecule, where vertices represent atoms and edges bonds. Similarly, in biology or ecology, graphs can readily express such systems as species networks, ecological relationships, migration paths, or the spread of diseases. Graphs are also proper structures for modeling biological and chemical pathways.
Some of the exemplar natural systems that lend themselves to graph structures include:
As with physical networks, a graph representation for natural systems provides real benefits in computer processing and analysis. Once expressed as a graph, all graph algorithms and perspectives from graph theory and network science can be brought to bear. Statistical methods are particularly applicable to representing connections between interacting parts of a system, as well to representing the physical dynamics of natural systems.
Parallel with the growth of the Internet and Web has been the growth of social networks. Social network analysis (SNA) has arguably been the single most important driver for advances in graph theory and analysis algorithms in recent years. New and interesting problems and challenges — from influence to communities to conflicts — are now being elucidated through techniques pioneered for SNA.
Second only in size to the Internet has been the graph of interactions arising from Facebook. Facebook had about 900 million users as of May 2012, half of which accessed the service via mobile devices [6]. Facebook famously embraced the graph with its own Open Graph protocol, which makes it easy for users to access and tie into Facebook’s social network. A representation of the Facebook social graph as of December 2010 is shown in this well-known figure:
The suitability of the graph structure to capture relationships has been a real boon to better understanding of social and community dynamics. Many new concepts have been introduced as the result of SNA, including such things as influence, diversity, centrality, cliques and so forth. (The opening diagram to this article, for example, models centrality, with blue the maximum and red the minimum.)
Particular areas of social interaction that lend themselves to SNA include:
Entirely new insights have arisen from SNA including finding terrorist leaders, analyzing prestige, or identifying keystone vendors or suppliers in business ecosystems.
Given the ubiquity of graphs as representations of real systems and networks, it is certainly not surprising to see their use in computer science as as means for information representation. We already saw in the table above the many data structures that can be represented as graphs, but the paradigm has even broader applicability.
The critical breakthroughs have come through using the graph as a basis for data models and logic models. These, in turn, provide the basis for crafting entire graph-based vocabularies and languages. Once such structures are embraced, it is a natural extension to also extend the mindset to graph databases as well.
Some of the notable information representations that have a graph as their basis include:
A key point of graphs noted earlier was their inherent extensibility. Once graphs are understood as a great basis for representing both logic and data structures, it is a logical next step to see their applicability extend to knowledge representations and knowledge bases as well.
Graph-theoretic methods have proven particularly useful in linguistics, since natural language often lends itself well to discrete structure. So, not only can graphs represent syntactic and compositional structure, but they can also capture the interrelationships of terms and concepts within those languages. The usefulness of graph theory to linguistics is shown by the various knowledge bases such as WordNet (in various languages) and VerbNet.
Domain ontologies are similar structures, capturing the relationships amongst concepts within a given knowledge domain. These are also known as knowledge graphs, and Google has famously just released its graph of entities to the world [7]. Semantic networks and neural networks are similar knowledge representations.
The following interactive diagram, of the UMBEL knowledge graph of about 25,000 reference concepts for helping to orient disparate datasets [8], shows that some of these graph structures can get quite large:
What all of these examples show is the nearly universal applicability of graphs, from the abstract to the physical, from the small to the large, and every gradation between. We also see how basic graph structures and concepts can be built upon with more structure. This breadth points to the many synergies and innovations that may be transferred from diverse fields to advance the usefulness of graph theories.
Despite the many advances that have occurred in graph theory and the increased attention from social network analysis, many, many graph problems remain some of the hardest in computation. Optimizations, partitioning, mapping, inferencing, traversing and graph structure comparisons remain challenging. And, some of these challenges are only growing due to the growth in the size of networks and graphs.
Applying the lessons of the Internet in such areas as non-relational databases, distributed processing, and big data and map reduce-oriented approaches will help some in this regard. We’re learning how to divide and conquer big problems, and we are discovering data and processing architectures more amenable to graph-based problems.
The fact we have now entered the Age of the Graph also bodes that further scrutiny and attention will lead to more analytic breakthroughs and innovation. We may be in an era of Big Data, but the structure underlying all of that is the graph. And that reality, I predict, will result in accelerated advances in graph theory.
There are many semantic technology terms relevant to the context of a semantic technology installation [1]. Some of these are general terms related to language standards, as well as to ontologies or the dataset concept.
<attribute name, value>
Frequently customers ask me why semantic technologies should be used instead of conventional information technologies. In the areas of knowledge representation (KR) and knowledge management (KM), there are compelling reasons and benefits for selecting semantic technologies over conventional approaches. This article attempts to summarize these rationales from a layperson perspective.
It is important to recognize that semantic technologies are orthogonal to the buzz around some other current technologies, including cloud computing and big data. Semantic technologies are also not limited to open data: they are equivalently useful to private or proprietary data. It is also important to note that semantic technologies do not imply some grand, shared schema for organizing all information. Semantic technologies are not “one ring to rule them all,” but rather a way to capture the world views of particular domains and groups of stakeholders. Lastly, semantic technologies done properly are not a replacement for existing information technologies, but rather an added layer that can leverage those assets for interoperability and to overcome the semantic barriers between existing information silos.
The world is a messy place. Not only is it complicated and richly diverse, but our ways of describing and understanding it are made more complex by differences in language and culture.
We also know the world to be interconnected and interdependent. Effects of one change can propagate into subtle and unforeseen effects. And, not only is the world constantly changing, but so is our understanding of what exists in the world and how it affects and is affected by everything else.
This means we are always uncertain to a degree about how the world works and the dynamics of its working. Through education and research we continually strive to learn more about the world, but often in that process find what we thought was true is no longer so and even our own human existence is modifying our world in manifest ways.
Knowledge is very similar to this nature of the world. We find that knowledge is never complete and it can be found anywhere and everywhere. We capture and codify knowledge in structured, semi-structured and unstructured forms, ranging from “soft” to “hard” information. We find that the structure of knowledge evolves with the incorporation of more information.
We often see that knowledge is not absolute, but contextual. That does not mean that there is no such thing as truth, but that knowledge should be coherent, to reflect a logical consistency and structure that comports with our observations about the physical world. Knowledge, like the world, is constantly changing; we thus must constantly adapt to what we observe and learn.
These observations about the world and knowledge are not platitudes but important guideposts for how we should organize and manage information, the field known as “information technology.” For IT to truly serve the knowledge function, its logical bases should be consistent with the inherent nature of the world and knowledge.
By knowledge functions we mean those areas of various computer applications that come under the rubrics of search, business intelligence, competitive intelligence, planning, forecasting, data federation, data warehousing, knowledge management, enterprise information integration, master data management, knowledge representation, and so forth. These applications are distinctly different than the earliest and traditional concerns of IT systems: accounting and transactions.
A transaction system — such as calculating revenue based on seats on a plane, the plane’s occupancy, and various rate classes — is a closed system. We can count the seats, we know the number of customers on board, and we know their rate classes and payments. Much can be done with this information, including yield and profitability analysis and other conventional ways of accounting for costs or revenues or optimizations.
But, as noted, neither the world nor knowledge is a closed system. Trying to apply legacy IT approaches to knowledge problems is fraught with difficulties. That is the reason that for more than four decades enterprises have seen massive cost overruns and failed projects in applying conventional IT approaches to knowledge problems: traditional IT is fundamentally mismatched to the nature of the problems at hand.
What works efficiently for transactions and accounting is a miserable failure applied to knowledge problems. Traditional relational databases work best with structured data; are inflexible and fragile when the nature (schema) of the world changes; and thus require constant (and expensive) re-architecting in the face of new knowledge or new relationships.
Of course, often knowledge problems do consider fixed entities with fixed attributes to describe them. In these cases, relational data systems can continue to act as valuable contributors and data managers of entities and their attributes. But, in the role of organizing across schema or dealing with semantics and differences of definition and scope – that is, the common types of knowledge questions – a much different integration layer with a much different logic basis is demanded.
The first change that is demanded is to shift the logic paradigm of how knowledge and the world are modeled. In contrast to the closed-world approach of transaction systems, IT systems based on the logical premise of the open world assumption (OWA) mean:
Much more can be said about OWA, including formal definitions of the logics underlying it [1], but even from the statements above, we can see that the right logic for most knowledge representation (KR) problems is the open world approach.
This logic mismatch is perhaps the most fundamental cause of failures, cost overruns, and disappointing deliverables for KM and KR projects over the years. But, like the fingertip between the eyes that cannot be seen because it is too close at hand, the importance of this logic mismatch strangely continues to be overlooked.
Data exists in many forms and of many natures. As one classification scheme, there are:
Further, these types of data may be “soft”, such as social information or opinion, or “hard”, more akin to measurable facts or quantities.
These various forms may also be serialized in a variety of data formats or data transfer protocols, some using straight text with a myriad of syntax or markup vocabularies, ranging to scripts or forms encoded or binary.
Still further, any of these data forms may be organized according to a separate schema that describes the semantics and relationships within the data.
These variations further complicate the inherently diverse nature of the world and knowledge of it. A suitable data model for knowledge representation must therefore have the power to be able to capture the form, format, serialization or schema of any existing data within the diversity of these options.
The Resource Description Framework (RDF) data model has such capabilities [2]. Any extant data form or schema (from the simple to the complex) can be converted to the RDF data model. This capability enables RDF to act as a “universal solvent” for all information.
Once converted to this “canonical” form, RDF can then act as a single representation around which to design applications and other converters (for “round-tripping” to legacy systems, for example), as illustrated by this diagram:
Generic tools can then be driven by the RDF data model, which leads to fewer applications required and lower overall development costs.
Lastly, RDF can represent simple assertions (“Jane runs fast”) to complex vocabularies and languages. It is in this latter role that RDF can begin to represent the complexity of an entire domain via what is called an “ontology” or “knowledge graph.”
When representing knowledge, more things and concepts get drawn into consideration. In turn, the relationships of these things lead to connections between them to capture the inherent interdependence and linkages of the world. As still more things get considered, more connections are made and proliferate.
This process naturally leads to a graph structure, with the things in the graphs represented as nodes and the relationships between them represented as connecting edges. More things and more connections lead to more structure. Insofar as this structure and its connections are coherent, the natural structure of the knowledge graph itself can help lead to more knowledge and understanding.
How one such graph may emerge is shown by this portion of the recently announced Google Knowledge Graph [3], showing female Nobel prize winners:
Unlike traditional data tables, graphs have a number of inherent benefits, particularly for knowledge representations. They provide:
Graphs are the natural structures for knowledge domains.
Once built, graphs offer some analytical capabilities not available through traditional means of information structure. Graph analysis is a rapidly emerging field, but already some unique measures of knowledge domains are now possible to gauge:
As science is coming to appreciate, graphs can represent any extant structure or schema. This gives graphs a universal character in terms of analytic tools. Further, many structures can only be represented by graphs.
The nature of knowledge is such that relevant information is everywhere. Further, because of the interconnectedness of things, we can also appreciate that external information needs to be integrated with internal information. Meanwhile, the nature of the world is such that users and stakeholders may be anywhere.
These observations suggest a knowledge representation architecture that needs to be truly distributed. Both sources and users may be found in multiple locations.
In order to preserve existing information assets as much as possible (see further below) and to codify the earlier observation regarding the broad diversity of data formats, the resulting knowledge architecture should also attempt to put in place a thin layer or protocol that provides uniform access to any source or target node on the physical network. A thin, uniform abstraction layer – with appropriate access rights and security considerations – means knowledge networks may grow and expand at will at acceptable costs with minimal central coordination or overhead.
Properly designed, then, such architectures are not only necessary to represent the distributed nature of users and knowledge, but can also facilitate and contribute to knowledge development and exchange.
The items above suggest the Web as an appropriate protocol for distributed access and information exchange. When combined with the following considerations, it becomes clear that the Web is the perfect medium for knowledge networks:
It is not surprising that the largest extant knowledge networks on the globe – such as Google, Wikipedia, Amazon and Facebook – are Web-based. These pioneers have demonstrated the wisdom of WOA for cost-effective scalability and universal access.
Also, the combination of RDF with Web identifiers also means that any and all information from a given knowledge repository may be exposed and made available to others as linked data. This approach makes the Web a global, universal database. And it is in keeping with the general benefits of integrating external information sources.
Existing IT assets represent massive sunk costs, legacy knowledge and expertise, and (often) stakeholder consensus. Yet, these systems are still largely stovepiped.
Strategies that counsel replacement of existing IT systems risk wasting existing assets and are therefore unlikely to be adopted. Ways must be found to leverage the value already embodied in these systems, while promoting interoperability and integration.
The beauty of semantic technologies – properly designed and deployed in a Web-oriented architecture – is that a thin interoperability layer may be placed over existing IT assets to achieve these aims. The knowledge graph structure may be used to provide the semantic mappings between schema, while the Web service framework that is part of the WOA provides the source conversion to the canonical RDF data model.
Via these approaches, prior investments in knowledge, information and IT assets may be preserved while enabling interoperability. The existing systems can continue to provide the functionality for which they were originally designed and deployed. Meanwhile, the KR-related aspects may be exposed and integrated with other knowledge assets on the physical network.
These kinds of approaches represent a fundamental shift in power and roles with respect to IT in the enterprise. IT departments and their bottlenecks in writing queries and bespoke application development can now be bypassed; the departments may be relegated to more appropriate support roles. Developers and consultants can now devote more of their time to developing generic applications driven by graph structures [4].
In turn, the consumers of knowledge applications – namely subject matter experts, employees, partners and stakeholders – now become the active contributors to the graphs themselves, focusing on reconciling terminology and ensuring adequate entity and concept coverage. Knowledge graphs are relatively straightforward structures to build and maintain. Those that rely on them can also be those that have the lead role in building and maintaining them.
Thus, graph-driven applications can be made generic by function with broader and more diverse information visualization capabilities. Simple instructions in the graphs can indicate what types of information can be displayed with what kind of widget. Graph-driven applications also mean that those closest to the knowledge problems will also be those directly augmenting the graphs. These changes act to democratize the knowledge function, and lower overall IT costs and risks.
Elsewhere we have discussed the specific components that go into enabling the development of a semantic enterprise, what we have termed the seven pillars [5]. Most of these points have been covered to one degree or another in the discussion above.
There are off-the-shelf starter kits for enterprises to embrace to begin this process. The major starting requirements are to develop appropriate knowledge graphs (ontologies) for the given domain and to convert existing information assets into appropriate interoperable RDF form.
Beyond that, enterprise staff may be readily trained in the use and growth of the graphs, and in the staging and conversion of data. With an appropriate technology transfer component, these semantic technology systems can be maintained solely by the enterprise itself without further outside assistance.
Unlike conventional IT systems with their closed-world approach, semantic technologies that adhere to these guidelines can be deployed incrementally at lower cost and with lower risk. Further, we have seen that semantic technologies offer an excellent integration approach, with no need to re-do schema because of changed circumstances. The approach further leverages existing information assets and brings the responsibility for the knowledge function more directly to its users and consumers.
Semantic technologies are thus well-suited for knowledge applications. With their graph structures and the ability to capture semantic differences and meanings, these technologies can also accommodate multiple viewpoints and stakeholders. There are also excellent capabilities to relate all available information – from documents and images and metadata to tables and databases – into a common footing.
These advantages will immediately accrue through better integration and interoperability of diverse information assets. But, for early adopters, perhaps the most immediate benefit will come from visible leadership in embracing these enabling technologies in advance of what will surely become the preferred approach to knowledge problems.
Note: there is a version of this article on Slideshare:
Modularization Also Leads to Big Graph VisualizationWe are pleased to announce the release of version 1.05 of UMBEL, which now has linkages to schema.org [6] and GeoNames [1]. UMBEL has also been split into ‘core’ and ‘geo’ modules. The resulting smaller size of UMBEL ‘core’ — now some 26,000 reference concepts — has also enabled us to create a full visualization of UMBEL’s content graph.
The first notable change in UMBEL v. 1.05 is its mapping to schema.org. schema.org is a collection of schema (usable as HTML tags) that webmasters can use to markup their pages in ways recognized by major search providers. schema.org was first developed and organized by the major search engines of Bing, Google and Yahoo!; later Yandex joined as a sponsor. Now many groups are supporting schema.org and contributing vocabularies and schema.
I was one of the first to hail schema.org hours after its announcement [7]. It seemed only fair that we put our money where our mouth is and map UMBEL to it as well.
The UMBEL-schema.org mapping was manually done by, firstly, searching and inspecting the current UMBEL concept base for appropriate matches. If that mapping failed to find a rather direct correspondence between existing UMBEL concepts and the types in schema.org, the source concept reference of OpenCyc was then inspected in a similar manner. Failing a match from either of these two sources, the decision was to add a new concept to the ‘core’ UMBEL. This new concept was then appropriately placed into the UMBEL reference concept subject structure.
The net result of this process was to add 298 mapped schema.org types to UMBEL. This mapping required a further three concepts from OpenCyc, and a further 78 new reference concepts, to be added to UMBEL. Along with the new updates to UMBEL and its mappings, the section of Key Files below provides further explanatory links. We are reserving the addition of schema.org properties for a later time, when we plan to re-organize the Attributes SuperType within UMBEL.
Even in the early development of UMBEL there was a tension about the scope and level of what geographic information to include in its concept base. The initial decision was to support country and leading-country province and state concepts, and some leading cities. This decision was in the spirit of a general reference structure, but still felt arbitrary.
GeoNames is devoted to geographical information and concepts — both natural and human artifacts — and has become the go-to resource for geo-locational information. The decision was thus made to split out the initial geo-locational information in UMBEL and replace it with mappings to GeoNames. This decision also had the advantage of beginning a process of modularization of UMBEL. 
Two sets of reference concepts were identified as useful for splitting out from the ‘core’ UMBEL in a geo-locational aspect:
These removed concepts were then placed into a separate ‘geo’ module of UMBEL, including all existing annotations and relations, resulting in a module of 1,854 concepts. That left 26,046 concepts in UMBEL ‘core’. Because of some shared parent concepts, there is some minor overlap between the two modules. These are now the modular splits in UMBEL version 1.05.
GeoNames has a different structure to UMBEL. It has few classes and distinguishes its geographic information on the basis of some 671 feature codes. These codes span from geopolitical divisions — such as countries, states or provinces, cities, or other administrative districts — to splits and aggregations by natural and human features. Types of physical terrain — above ground and underwater — are denoted, as well as regions and landscape features governed by human activities (such as vineyards or lighthouses) [1]. We wanted to retain this richness in our mappings.
We needed a bridge between feature codes and classes, a sort of umbrella property generally equivalent to owl:sameAs in nature, but with some possible inexactitude or degree of approximation. The appropriate choice here is umbel:correspondsTo, which was designed specifically for this purpose [2]. This predicate is thus the basis for the mappings.
The 671 GeoNames feature codes were manually mapped to corresponding classes in the UMBEL concepts, in a manner identical to what was described for schema.org above. The result was to add another further three OpenCyc concepts and to add 88 new UMBEL reference concepts to accommodate the full GeoNames feature codes. We thus now have a complete representation of the full structure and scope of GeoNames in UMBEL.
There are three modes in which one can now work with UMBEL:
In the latter case, you may use SPARQL queries with the umbel:correspondsTo predicate to achieve the desired retrievals. If more logic is required, you will likely need to look to a rules-based addition such as SWRL [3] or RIF [4] to capture the umbel:correspondsTo semantics.
Because of the UMBEL modularization, it has now become tractable to graph the main ontology in its entirety. The core UMBEL ontology contains about 26,000 reference concepts organized according to 33 super types. There are more than 60,000 relationships amongst these concepts, resulting in a graph structure of very large size.
It is difficult to grasp this graph in the abstract. Thus, using methods earlier described in our use of the Gephi visualization software [5], we present below a dynamic, navigable rendering of this graph of UMBEL core:
Note: at standard resolution, if this graph were to be rendered in actual size, it would be larger than 34 feet by 34 feet square at full zoom !!! Hint: that is about 1200 square feet, or 1/2 the size of a typical American house !
This UMBEL graph displays:
You may also want to inspect a static version of this big graph by downloading a PDF.
Lastly, we fully updated the UMBEL Web site and re-released the UMBEL wiki.
x:coref predicate from the UMBC Ebiquity group; see further Jennifer Sleeman and Tim Finin, 2010. “Learning Co-reference Relations for FOAF Instances,” Proceedings of the Poster and Demonstration Session at the 9th International Semantic Web Conference, November 2010; see http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/_file_directory_/papers/522.pdf. In the words of Tim Finin of the Ebiquity group:
owl:sameAs may lead to contradictions. However, virtually merging the descriptions in a co-reference engine is fine — both provide information that is useful in disambiguating future references as well as for many other purposes. Our property (:coref) is a transitive, symmetric property that is a super-property of owl:sameAs and is paired with another, :notCoref that is symmetric and generalizes owl:differentFrom.When we look at the analog properties noted above, we see that the property objects tend to share reflexivity, symmetry and transitivity. We specifically designed the umbel:correspondsTo predicate to capture these close, nearly equivalent, but uncertain degree of relationships.
Ontology Modularization and Roles within an OSF InstanceFor some time now, Structured Dynamics (SD) has been touting the unique advantages of ODapps, or ontology-driven applications [1]. ODapps are modular, generic software applications designed to operate in accordance with the specifications contained in one or more ontologies. The relationships and structure of the information driving these applications are based on the standard functions and roles of ontologies (namely as domain ontologies), as supplemented by UI and instruction sets and validations and rules. When these supplements are added to standard ontology functions, we collectively term them adaptive ontologies [2].
To further the discussion around ODapps, today we are publishing two new documents, using the semantic technology foundation of the open semantic framework. OSF is a comprehensive, open source stack of SD and external tools that provides a turnkey environment for enterprises to adopt semantic technologies and approaches. OSF has been designed from the ground up to be an ontology-driven application framework.
The first new document, posted on Fred Giasson’s blog, provides a detailed discussion of the dozen or so roles ontologies can play within an OSF installation. Fred’s document is geared more to specific properties and configurations useful to deploy this framework; that is, the “drivers” in an ODapp setting. The second new document — this one — is more of a broad overview of the modularization and architecture of the constituent ontologies that make up an OSF installation. Both documents have also been posted to SD’s open content TechWiki [3], which now has about 360 technical articles on understanding and implementing an OSF installation, importantly including its ontologies.
As presently configured, an OSF installation may typically utilize most or all of the following internal ontologies:
(Note: the internal wiki links to each of these ontologies also provides links to the actual ontology specifications on Github.)
Depending on the specific OSF installation, of course, multiple external ontologies may also be employed. Some of the common external ones used in an OSF installation are described by the external ontologies document on the TechWiki. These external ontologies are important — indeed essential in order to ensure linkage to the external world — but have little to do with internal OSF control structures. That is why the rest of this discussion is focused on internal ontologies only.
The actual relationships between these ontologies are shown in the following diagram. Note that the ontologies tend to cluster into two main areas:
This ontology architecture supports the broader open semantic framework:
(click for full size)
The WSF ontology plays a special role in that it sets the overall permission and access rights to the other components and ontologies. The UMBEL ontology (or other upper-level ontologies that might be chosen) is also optional. Such vocabularies are included when interoperability with external applications or knowledge bases is desired.
We can further disaggregate these ontology splits with respect to the specific dozen or so ontology roles discussed in Fred’s complementary piece on ontology roles in OSF. These dozen roles are shown by the rows with interactions marked for the various ontologies:
| S C O |
A G G R |
W S F |
i r O N |
D o m a i n |
U M B E L |
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| Define record descriptions | ♦ | |||||
| Inform interface displays | ♦ | ♦ | ♦ | |||
| Integrate different data sources | ♦ | ♦ | ♦ | |||
| Define component selections | ♦ | ♦ | ♦ | ♦ | ||
| Define component behaviors | ♦ | ♦ | ||||
| Guide template selection | ♦ | ♦ | ♦ | |||
| Provide reasoning and inference | ♦ | ♦ | ♦ | |||
| Guide content filtering (with and without inference) | ♦ | ♦ | ||||
| Tag concepts in text documents | ♦ | ♦ | ♦ | |||
| Help organize and navigate Web portals | ♦ | ♦ | ||||
| Manage datasets and ontologies | ♦ | |||||
| Set access permissions and registrations | ♦ |
One of the unique aspects of adaptive ontologies is their added role in informing user interfaces and supporting specific semantic tools. Note, for example, the role of the content ontologies in informing interface displays, as well as their use in tagging concepts (via information extraction). These additional roles are the reason that these ontologies are shown as straddling both content and administrative functions in the first figure.
See Fred’s piece to learn more about these dozen roles.
Naturally, a simple drawn arrow between ontologies (first figure) or a checkmark on a matrix (table above) can hide important details of how these interactions between ontologies and components actually work. In an earlier article, we discussed how the whole workflow takes place between users and user interface selections affecting the types of data returned by those selections, and then the semantic components (widgets) used to display them. This example interaction is shown by the following animation:
(click for full size)
The blue nodes show the ontology interactions. These, in turn, instruct how the various components (yellow) and code (green) need to operate. These interactions are the essence of an ontology-driven app. The software is expressively designed to respond to specifications in the ontology(ies) used, and the ontologies themselves embrace some additional properties specific to driving those apps.
ODapps are a relatively new paradigm, from which we continue to learn more about uses and potentials. We have wanted to write the first versions of these two new documents for some time, but have held off as we learned and exploited further the latent potentials in this design. As it stands, we see further potentials in this approach, and will therefore be likely adding new ontologies and capabilities to the general system for some time.
Some of the areas that look promising to us include:
These potentials arise from the native power of the design basis for ontology-driven apps. Conceptually, the design is simplicity itself. Operationally, the system is extremely flexibile and robust. Strategically, it means that development and specification efforts can now move from coding and programmers to ontologies and the subject matter users who define and depend on them. With these advantages, who can argue with that?
