lsarni / skoton

SKOS to lightweight ontology

skoton (beta)

Java Application to re-engineering a SKOS taxonomy into a lightweight ontology.

What it does

The process of re-engineering the taxonomy is based in the pattern for re-engineering a term-based thesaurus, which follows the recordbased data model, into an ontology schema developed by Boris Villazón-Terrazas, Mari Carmen Suárez-Figueroa, and Asunción Gómez-Pérez (better explained in their paper).

To do so we start from a XML file that follows the SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System) recommendations and carry on the following steps:

1. Create an AnnotationProperty called altLabel to store the values of skos:altLabel.
2. Create a OWLClass for each Concept, named using the value of the rdf:about attribute.
3. Add a label to the class for each skos:prefLabel, using the given value and language (xml:lang).
4. Add a altLabel to the class for each skos:altLabel, using the given value and language.
5. Set all the skos:narrower concepts as subClassOf the given class.

Limitations

Since this is a beta version there are some limitations:

• The first node of the .xml file (inside the rdf:RDF node) must be the skos:ConceptSchema. There can be more than one skos:ConceptSchema but the rest will be ignored.
• The skos:ConceptSchema must declare all the top nodes of the taxonomy using this format <skos:hasTopConcept rdf:resource="#someConcept"/>. Only the nodes connected to this ones using the skos:narrower relationship will end up on the ontology. This means that if the ConceptSchema has no skos:hasTopConcept properties the resulting ontology will have no classes.
• For now the skos:related property won't be represented on the ontology (although it is part of the described pattern).

How to use

After downloading and building the project just run it. It will ask for (press enter after each one):

• Full file path of the ontology (.owl)
• Full file path of the taxonomy (.xml) After that it will start processing the taxonomy and finally save the ontology.

Example

This project was developed for (and tested with) the 2012 ACM Computing Classification System, the SKOS file can be obtained here. In the example folder I will included the target ontology and a reduced version of the classification that was used for testing (just keeping 3 concepts).

Just run the project and input the strings as required:

Enter the full path of the ontology file (.owl):
C:\Users\lulas\Documents\skoton\example\acm-css.owl
Enter the full path of the SKOS taxonomy:
C:\Users\lulas\Documents\skoton\example\acm-css-lite.xml
SKOSConceptScheme: Start processing...
SKOSConceptScheme: Finished processing
  topConcepts=1
SKOS: Start processing...
SKOSConcept: Start processing #10002944...
SKOSConcept: Finished processing #10002944
  prefLabels=1, altLabels=1, narrower=2, related=0
SKOSConcept: Start processing #10011122...
SKOSConcept: Finished processing #10011122
  prefLabels=1, altLabels=0, narrower=0, related=0
SKOSConcept: Start processing #10011123...
SKOSConcept: Finished processing #10011123
  prefLabels=1, altLabels=2, narrower=0, related=0
SKOS: Finished processing
Ontology: Start processing concepts...
Ontology: Processing #10002944
Ontology: Processing #10011122
Ontology: Processing #10011123
Ontology: Saving ontology...

The result of running the application should be the same ontology as the one on the acm-css-result.owl file.