One of the biggest challenges in distributed and complex networked business relationships is to find a common language for overarching, shared communication. Ontologies are an effective tool for this requirement.

However, working with and using ontologies requires close collaborative and cross-skill cooperation between different stakeholders (domain experts and knowledge workers). The SC3 platform addresses exactly this need and primarily enables the easy aggregation of distributed, managed ontologies into collections.

The centrally available ontologies of the SC3 platform can be transformed into different visualizations. From simple graph-based visualizations to more complex partial views or textual representations.

The SC3 platform is a community-driven project. We are looking forward to more users and new projects that can be collaboratively worked on through our platform.  

If you are visiting the SC3 portal for the first time, you can get a brief overview of the portal by reading our documentation page. If you want to try out the portal yourself, you should first register with your e-mail address. This will allow you to browse our test projects (sandbox) and try out the functionality with pre-installed or custom ontologies. To select the sandbox project, simply click on the menu icon (three bars in the upper left corner) and select "Projects from". In the list of all projects, select the "Sandbox project". In the sandbox project you can load your own ontology or select one of the preloaded ontologies. Once you have selected an ontology, new visualization options will appear in the menu for you to choose from. All ontologies loaded from a Git repository can also be compared in terms of changes to all other commits (Ontology Comparison).   By the way, the SC3 portal also includes a WebProtégé installation. You can use it to collaboratively edit your ontologies. This WebProtégé instance has been extended by us so that you can load your ontologies directly from Git and restore changes. Currently our extended WebProtege installation still requires a separate registration.  

Are you interested or do you have further questions? Then please visit the SC3 platform and / or contact us directly.  

Semantic Web Technologies for a Common Language

With SC3 on its way to create a common language for total collaboration between humans and machines and all partners involved, here is a description of project partner TIB’s motivation and approach in contributing to an overall success. The Technische Informationsbibliothek Hannover is an information service provider for major international corporations and it builds on its expertise in ontology development, maintenance and publication.

Collaborative Ontology Development Framework

Addressing the machine-readable conceptualisation of the semiconductor domain and related supply chains, it takes standardised ontologies of high quality and a common agreement of conceptualisations to fully apply the advantages of Semantic Web technologies into the domain. Ontology development typically involves joint efforts of domain experts and knowledge engineers. While the latter tend to lack the depth knowledge of a specific domain to create ontologies of sufficient quality, the domain experts in turn find it often hard to follow logical notations in OWL (Web Ontology Language) representation.

To more directly involve them in ontology modelling and foster communication with knowledge engineers, approaches require mechanisms to reduce OWL formalisation complexity for domain experts. Still, they have to maintain the full OWL modelling features for knowledge engineers. This is why TIB is developing a user-centred approach for collaborative ontology development, addressing different user groups, their needs and backgrounds.

Bridging the gap between knowledge engineers and domain experts

A core aspect of the Semantic Web is to create and communicate conceptualisations of information and data in certain domains, with taxonomies, vocabularies, and ontologies providing a formal, machine-readable representation of the domain knowledge. Yet, ontology modelling is a difficult task involving the conceptualisations of processes and their relations. Moreover, the specifications of a knowledge domain have to be fulfilled serving the needs of different stakeholders.

To do so and to ensure a successful usage in specific use cases, an agreement of the conceptualisation must be established between various stakeholders. Visualisations provide an abstraction layer for the underlying data and a good starting point for exploration and understanding. Thus, they reduce the entrance barrier for domain experts to get more directly involved in ontology modelling. However, suitable visualisations are highly dependent on individual use cases and targeted user groups. Flexible and customisable approaches are required to allow users to adjust visual representations to their needs.

Hybrid modes of operation

TIB identified that the most crucial requirement for the approach is to serve users' needs from various audiences with diverse backgrounds and in different contexts. Because web-based approaches are ready-to-use without the need to install additional software they reduce entrance barriers and engage different user groups more directly.

Having defined the above-mentioned domain experts (non-experts as to ontology modelling) and the knowledge engineers (expert users) as the two relevant user groups in the project, TIB describes the individual requirements as follows:

“For domain experts the approach should be easy-to-learn/easy-to-use with a least complex OWL modelling, providing guidance and best-practice suggestions during the modelling. For expert users in turn the approach should support all modelling features of the commonly used open source ontology editor Protégé; and visual modelling paradigms in the form of node-link diagrams can address the requirements easy-to-use and low complexity.

However, they have to provide additional customisations for the visual representation to facilitate understanding. The requirements guidance and best practices can be addressed using auto-complete functionalities to align the created nodes and links with existing terms of ontologies, reducing manual labour to transform high-level conceptualisations to OWL elements.

To support all OWL modelling features, we envision the use and extension of the OWL-API (Java Application Programming Interface), the backbone of Protégé. Additionally, to engage diverse groups in the modelling process, we envision three modes of modelling operation: textual (for expert users), widget-based (for intermediate users) and visual (for novel users).

For a successful adoption and broad use, we define additional requirements for a collaborative ontology development framework which allows to create and to share different views, thus enabling and fostering communication on all abstraction levels and between various stakeholders.

Since the created ontologies and their conceptualisations thrive from discussions and joint agreement upon their definitions and their usage, blockchain technologies providing the means for versioning and history of changes should be part of the solution. Integrating them with ontology development will foster trust and validation of ontologies and enable long term support for downward compatible systems using old ontology versions”.