Examining the interrelatedness between ontologies and Linked Data
| Published date | 19 June 2017 |
| Pages | 312-331 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/LHT-10-2016-0107 |
| Date | 19 June 2017 |
| Author | Biswanath Dutta |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Librarianship/library management,Library technology,Information behaviour & retrieval,Information user studies,Metadata,Information & knowledge management,Information & communications technology,Internet |
Examining the interrelatedness
between ontologies and
Linked Data
Biswanath Dutta
Documentation Research and Training Centre, Indian Statistical Institute,
Bangalore, India
Abstract
Purpose –Ontology and Linked Data (LD) are the two prominent web technologies that have emerged in the
recent past. Both of them are at the center of Semantic Web and its applications. Researchers anddevelopers
from both academia and business are actively working in these areas. The increasing interest in these
technologies promoted the growth of LD sets and ontologies on the web. The purpose of this paper is to
investigate the possible relationships between them. The effort is to investigate the possible roles that
ontologies may play in further empowering the LD. In a similar fashion, the author also studies the possible
roles that LD may play to empower ontologies.
Design/methodology/approach –The work is mainly carried out by exploring the ontology- and
LD-based real-world systems, and by reviewing the existing literature.
Findings –The current work reveals, in general, that both the technologies are interdependent and have lots
to offer to each other for their faster growth and meaningful development. Specifically, anything that we can
do with LD, we can do more by adding an ontology to it.
Practical implications –The author envisions that the current work, in the one hand, will help in boosting
the successful implementation and the delivery of semantic applications; on the other hand, itwill also become
a food for the future researchers in further investigating the relationships between the ontologies and LD.
Originality/value –So far, as per the author’s knowledge, there are very little works that have attempted in
exploring the relationships between the ontologies and LD. In this work, the author illustrates the real-world
systems that are based on ontology and LD, discusses the issues and challenges and finally illustrates their
interdependency discussing some of the ongoing research works.
Keywords Linked Data, Challenges, Applications, Ontology, Data integration and schema alignment,
Relationships between ontology and Linked Data
Paper type Conceptual paper
1. Introduction
Ontology, a formal explicit specification of a shared conceptualization (Studer et al., 1998),
is at the center of Semantic Web (SW) (Berners-Lee et al., 2001) and applications. It is a
vocabulary where the terms are expressed formally (using knowledge representation
formalism, such as, Description Logics) and defined explicitly (in terms of their properties
and constraints), which make them machine processable and interpretable. Ontologies are
useful for various purposes, for instance, annotating the documents, semantic information
retrieval, reasoning and inferencing and so forth (discussed further in Section 3.2).
An immense amount of research works are undergoing in the area of ontology, for instance,
ontology development and ontology design approaches, ontology evaluation and ontology
alignment and mapping (Adhikari et al., 2015). Varieties of ontologies are available on the
web ranging from general purpose ontologies (aka top-level ontologies, e.g., Cyc (OpenCyc
for the Semantic Web, 2012; Suggested Upper Merged Ontology, 2016; Masolo, et al., 2003))
to domain ontologies (e.g. spatial ontology, Gene Ontology (2016), food ontology) and
application ontologies (e.g. restaurant ontology, recipe ontology).
Linked Data (LD) refers to a structured data published on the web following a set of
principles designed to promote the interlinking between the things (aka resources) and
consequently between the various data sets on the web. Here data refer to anything
(W3C,2015), such as date,time, title, numbers,chemical properties, images,video clippings,etc.,
Library Hi Tech
Vol. 35 No. 2, 2017
pp. 312-331
© Emerald PublishingLimited
0737-8831
DOI 10.1108/LHT-10-2016-0107
Received 6 October 2016
Revised 7 April 2017
Accepted 7 April 2017
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0737-8831.htm
312
LHT
35,2
that one can conceive of. A large number of researchers and practitioners both from academia
and business are actively working in this area. Some of the notable Linked Data sets are
DBPedia (2016) Linked Data set, Freebase (2009), Geonames (2017), MusicBrainz (2000), etc.
The goal of the LD initiative is to create a huge data infrastructure, on top of which various
applications can be built, for instance, MashUp applications and question answering systems
(further discussed in Section 4.3). The expectation is that the LD technology will enable the
applications, say, question answering systems to process the complex queries, such as, give me
the books on topic T written by an Indian author A who worked with an Italian professor A’in
University U during the time period t.
From theabove discussion,precisely we can saythat while the objectiveof an ontologyis to
assist the software program in semantic operations, the objective of LD is to assist in
developing a global data infrastructure. Based on these technologies, several real-world
applications are developed as discussed in Sections 3 and 4. In the recent time, we see some
works questioning the relationships between the ontol ogies and LD. For example, in
Studer et al. (2011), the authors have raised a question “did Linked Data k ill ontologies?”
To study the relationships between ontologies, annotation and LD, Janowicz and Hitzler (2013)
have raised several questions, such as “are ontologies an additional layer on top of data models;
are they data models themselves; are Linked Data entities instances of ontological classes or
just annotated using ontologies which exist in their own realm; what difference does this make;
what is the role of semantics & reasoning for querying and information retrieval? […].”In the
current work, we aim to examine the possible relatedness between an ontology and LD.
Our effort is to investigate the possible roles that an ontology may play in further empowering
the LD. In a similar fashion, we investigate the possible roles that LD may play to empower and
strengthen the ontology and its development. To achieve this, we stud y the strengths and
weaknesses of both ontology and LD and explore whether they can be benefitted from
each other. The main contributions of the current work are as follows: illustrating a set of
ontology- and LD-based real-world systems; discussing the issues and challenges that both
ontology and LD face today; and more importantly, presenting their complementary features
reporting some of the ongoing-related research works. We envision that the current work, in
the one hand, will help in accelerating the development of ontology and LD and their
applications; on the other hand, it will also become a food for the future researchers in further
exploring the relationships between these two prominent SW technologies.
The rest of the work is organized as follows: S ection 2 discusses the related works; Section 3
elaborates the current state of the ontology. It illustrates some of the ontology-based real-world
systems and applications and also discusses some of the challenges that an ontology, especially
at the development phase, faces today. Similar to Section 3, Section 4 investigates the current
state of LD. The section first briefly discusses LD, its usefulness and some of its real-world
applications. And then elaborates some of the challenges that LD faces today. Section 5
explores the interrelatedness between an ontology and LD. It illustrates and explains how an
ontology and LD can be benefited from each other. Finally, Section 6 con cludes the paper
and provides some observations. It also discusses some research questions that need to be
further investigated.
2. Related work
So far, there are very few works have attempted to explore the relationships between an
ontology and LD. In this section we briefly discuss them.
Jain, Hitzler, Yeh, Verma and Sheth (2010) have explored the various limitations of
Linked Data cloud (LDC), for instance, lack of conceptual description of data sets, lack of
expressivity, the absence of schema-level links and so forth. They have advocated for the
use of an upper-level ontology to alleviate these limitations. According to them in the
absence of an ontology, LD, in its current form, is merely weakly linked “triple collection”
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Ontologies
and LD
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