Today I went to the Term Project Presentation of Knowledge Organization Course in LIS, and 3 presentations were given about using Protege for Knowledge Organization in different domains. One is about a periodical called “Taiwan Review”, one is about tea leaves and agriculture, and one is about music of Bunun (布農).
Taiwan Review
Taiwan Review is an English periodical issued by GIO Taiwan. The purpose of the periodical is to summarize the current status of art, society, and other events in Taiwan. They have editorials, interviews, and articles with figures and tables.
They designed the ontology as follows: the main class is bibliography, which has sub-class “Taiwan Review” and sub-sub-class “Vol.# …”. Articles in each volume are main instances in this work. They designed other aspects as attributes and indexing factors for the articles, including authors, persons mentioned (classified by the category), location (“Taiwan” is taking out of “Asia” because there are more items under Taiwan than other places in Asia. This is not logically sound, but may be more useful for users to navigate and query in practice.), and time span (They used decades before, but professor suggested to use events as separators of time span.)
Tea
Tea is an unique culture in East-Asia, but there are less focus on the knowledge organization about tea leaves, tea tools, and agriculture. The main class is tea, and it has relationship with the one who raise the tea leaves, the place, the making process, and related tea tools to make the tea. Because the student has the domain knowledge, this ontology is very well-organized and fit the application.
Music of Bunun
This work uses data and research results from other work to create the ontology. The music is separated into songs and instruments, and it records who plays the music at what situation and location. Some research results (domain knowledge) helps design the concepts and relationships.
Summary
Ontology is a tool to capture the concepts, relationship between concepts, and instances. The basic relationship between terminology are broader term(BT), narrower term(NT), and related term(RT). The design principle includes Clarity, Coherence, Extendibility, Minimal encoding bias, and Minimal ontological commitment. (Gruber 1993) There are several methodologies to design an ontology, and the components and steps proposed by Standford Protege team are domain, terminology, concept, relationships, and instances.
In determining the domain, several questions should be answered: What is the expert domain? Why we need this knowledge organization? What problems/questions should this KO answers? Who will use and maintain the KO, and how? Then we should search if there is similar ontologies, list the terminologies, define the classes/concepts and the relationship.
