User-friendly Web Based Mechanism to Incorporate Knowledge Evolution for Ontologies targeting Ontology-Illiterate Domain Users

Abstract

Knowledge Representation and Inference techniques are progressively gaining more attention among the general communities, with the recent enhancements in seamless global knowledge sharing capabilities. Ontologies are widely recognized as a promising mechanism to support the representation of such frequently evolving knowledge. However, the existing approaches for ontology maintenance are complex and are designed for users with knowledge-engineering expertise. Thus, despite the benefits of ontology based mechanisms in knowledge representation, their adoption and diffusion within general domains is significantly hindered. The purpose of this study is to investigate the means of addressing the said limitation by proposing a user-friendly mechanism to incorporate evolving knowledge into ontologies, targeting ontology-illiterate end users. Maintaining the T-Box or the ontology structure and accurate inference of new knowledge are considered prime objectives of the approach. A framework with flexible means of handling the ontology is exploited by hiding the underlying ontology base from user. A web based approach is adopted to support easy access and multiple collaboration. We focus on real-time consistency maintenance as a solution to complications at inference stage with traditional approaches, and introduce a unique model to handle inconsistencies at real-time, guaranteeing the end user to get hold of newly generated knowledge whenever demanded without hassle. We explored the usability of the proposed mechanism in the perspective of ontology-illiterate end users with repeated measure-task based and benchmarking methodologies. Also, use case scenario based evaluations were carried out to validate the proposed framework of the approach. The evaluation results prove the effectiveness of our approach against the existing complex standard tools.