CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ontologysemantic-webprotege
Arbo94
Arbo94

Reputation: 135

How to align my ontology with existing ontologies?

I am looking for guidance on what is the best way for ontology alignment? I am using protege for ontology modelling at the moment. I like to use other classes from existing ontologies. However, is it better to (1) make my own classes and then add the existing classes as equiavalentTo? or (2) import the existing ontologies or classes/relationships and use them as the start? Thanks!

Upvotes: 2

Views: 348

Answers (1)

IS4
IS4

Reputation: 13187

I don't think it's necessarily "better" to use either approach, but there are factors which may affect the choice:

  • Some vocabularies may not have a proper ontology, i.e. the terms are not described by anything that could be imported. You could still use the terms from the vocabulary directly, but you'd have to describe the ontology yourself to make them logically usable, at the risk of coming into conflict with someone else who would also want to use the vocabulary this way.

  • If you use the external ontology only marginally, and you don't want to describe all the classes and properties yourself since it pretty much aligns with the existing definitions, there is of course no need to "duplicate" it, as importing makes it less cluttered and helps people who are already familiar with the other ontology understand yours.

  • If you'd use the external ontology as the core, it depends on what you are creating. If you are merely extending it with new concepts, then again your concepts should align with those from the external ontology, so there is no issue with importing it (for the same reasons as above). However, if your ontology has a somewhat different focus, you may want to define the core terms yourself without relying on other ontologies, since it may as well come to the point that you decide that they are not really equivalent (like a "Person" in one ontology may not be equivalent to a "Person" in another ontology). Such a choice will be easier to make when you don't have to rewrite half of your ontology.

Last thing to note: owl:equivalentClass does not mean the classes are the same; just that they share the set of individuals. You could still give them your own descriptions, link them to other concepts etc. without affecting the equivalent classes, which still have their own "identity". This is similar in mathematics to Zorn's lemma, the well-ordering theorem, and the axiom of choice, which are all logically equivalent, yet they have their own Wikipedia articles so clearly they are not identical.

Upvotes: 2

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