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DIS-C: conceptual distance in ontologies, a graph-based approach

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Abstract

This paper presents the DIS-C approach, which is a novel method to assess the conceptual distance between concepts within an ontology. DIS-C is graph based in the sense that the whole topology of the ontology is considered when computing the weight of the relationships between concepts. The methodology is composed of two main steps. First, in order to take advantage of previous knowledge, an expert of the ontology domain assigns initial weight values to each of the relations in the ontology. Then, an automatic method for computing the conceptual relations refines the weights assigned to each relation until reaching a stable state. We introduce a metric called generality that is defined in order to evaluate the accessibility of each concept, considering the ontology like a strongly connected graph. Unlike most previous approaches, the DIS-C algorithm computes similarity between concepts in ontologies that are not necessarily represented in a hierarchical or taxonomic structure. So, DIS-C is capable of incorporating a wide variety of relationships between concepts such as meronymy, antonymy, functionality and causality.

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Notes

  1. Formally, the output is not a distance, since some conditions are not met, such as symmetry and triangle inequality.

  2. The distance is inversely proportional in the absolute value of the correlation.

  3. Simple rounding.

  4. As we have mentioned, the conceptual distance is not symmetric (\(\exists a,b\in C|\Delta _{K}(a,b)\ne \Delta _{K}(b,a)\)). So, we present the conceptual distance from word A to word B (column DIS-C(to)), from word B to word A (column DIS-C(from)), the average of these two distances (column DIS-C(avg), the minimum (DIS-C(min)) and the maximum (column DIS-C(max)).

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Acknowledgements

Work partially sponsored by Instituto Politécnico Nacional and SIP-IPN under Grants 20182159, 20180308, 20180409, 20180773, 20180839 and 20181568. Also is sponsored by Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACyT) under Grant PN-2016/2110. We are thankful to the reviewers for their invaluable and constructive feedback that helped improve the quality of this paper.

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  1. Instituto Politécnico Nacional - Centro de Investigación en Computación, UPALM-Zacatenco, 07320, Mexico City, Mexico

    Rolando Quintero, Miguel Torres-Ruiz, Rolando Menchaca-Mendez, Marco A. Moreno-Armendariz, Giovanni Guzman & Marco Moreno-Ibarra

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  1. Rolando Quintero
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Quintero, R., Torres-Ruiz, M., Menchaca-Mendez, R. et al. DIS-C: conceptual distance in ontologies, a graph-based approach. Knowl Inf Syst 59, 33–65 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10115-018-1200-3

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