Utility Ontology Development with Formal Concept Analysis

Although it is well recognised that ontologies have an important role to play in data integration, the lack of established ontologies in domains of interest often makes ontology-based integration a difficult task. Previous research on ontology design methodologies shows that manual construction of ontologies is a complex process and it is very hard for a designer to develop a consistent ontology. This paper contributes a formal and semi-automated approach for the development of ontologies in the utility infrastructure domain. It arises from a practical industrial problem of integrating the vast network of underground asset records. These asset records are typically autonomous, i.e. owned and maintained by individual organisations, and are encoded in an uncoordinated way, i.e. without consideration of interoperability with other utility information systems. The proposed approach is based on formal concept analysis (FCA) which is a mathematical approach for abstracting from attribute-based object descriptions. This paper describes techniques developed to support utility ontology development, with a focus on resolving implicit and mismatch data. Some experiments have been carried out to construct a utility ontology with data from utility companies. Though issues addressed in the paper arise in utility ontology development, we anticipate that they should be interesting and relevant to other application domains.