Towards tailored domain ontologies

Introduction. The goal of domain ontology is to provide a common conceptual vocabulary to members of a virtual community of users who need to share their information in a particular domain (such as medical, tourism, banking, agricultural). The identification and definition of concepts that describe the domain knowledge requires a certain consensus. Generally, each member or subcommunity holds some knowledge, he has its own view on the domain, and he describes it with his own vocabulary. Thus, to reach a consensus allowing to reflect a common view of the domain can be a difficult task and even more harder if members are geographically dispersed. One way very widely used is to start from pre-existent elements in the domain: text corpus, taxonomies, ontology fragments, and to exploit them as a basis for gradually defining the domain ontology [2][7]. In this short paper, we present an approach using Ontology Matching techniques [1][5][6][3] for building a tailored domain ontology, starting from a general domain taxonomy and several pieces of knowledge given by different partners. Our strategy is to design a mediator, firstly to reach an agreement with each partner on their knowledge fragments that will be part to the shared domain ontology, and secondly to conciliate these various fragments by linking and structuring the concepts that compose them. As a mediator ontology, in our case study we use a public taxonomy that exists for describing subject fields in agriculture, forestry, fisheries, food and related domains (e.g. environment), called AGROVOC. The resulting domain ontology combines the following two features: (i) it is the portion of the general taxonomy that is relevant to the considered application domain as seen by each partner, (ii) it is completed and tailored by relations and properties coming from partner’s data. Fig. 1 shows an example of a domain ontology DO built starting from two local ontologies LO1 and LO2. DO’s concepts prefixed with ag are from AGROVOC. One can see that in DO Plan products and Varieties are related and also that they are related to attributes price and surface, which is not the case in AGROVOC.