Capturing the Basics of the GDPR in a Well-Founded Legal Domain Modular Ontology

The primary goal of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is to regulate the rights and duties of citizens and organizations over personal data protection. Implementing the GDPR is recently gaining much importance for legal reasoning and compliance checking purposes. In this work, we aim to capture the basics of GDPR in a well-founded legal domain modular ontology named OPPD (Ontology for the Protection of Personal Data). Ontology-Driven Conceptual Modeling (ODCM), ontology layering, modularization, and reuse processes are applied. These processes aim to support the ontology engineer in overcoming the complexity of the legal knowledge and developing an ontology model faithful to reality. ODCM is used for grounding OPPD in the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO). Ontology modularization and layering aim to simplify the ontology building process. Ontology reuse focuses on selecting and reusing Conceptual Ontology Patterns (COPs) from UFO and the legal core ontology UFO-L. OPPD intends to overcome the lack of a representation of legal procedures that most ontologies encountered. The potential use of OPPD is proposed to formalize the GDPR rules by combining ontological reasoning and Logic Programming.

CargO-S: A pattern-based well-founded legal domain ontology for the traceability of goods in logistic sea corridors

Building legal domain ontologies is a prominent challenge in the ontology engineering community. The ontology builders confront issues such as the complexity of the legal domain, the difficulty of applying existing ontology engineering approaches, and the intention of developing legal models faithful to realities. In this paper, we discuss constructing a well-founded legal domain ontology, named CargO-S, for the traceability of goods in logistic sea corridors. For building CargO-S, a pattern-oriented approach is applied, supported by ontology-driven conceptual modeling, ontology layering, and ontology reuse processes. CargO-S is grounded in the unified foundational ontology UFO by using the ontology-driven conceptual modeling language OntoUML. Besides, ontology layering is proposed to simplify the development process by dividing CargO-S into three layers located at different granularity levels: upper, core, and domain. For building the upper and core layers, conceptual ontology patterns are reused from the foundational ontology UFO and the legal core ontology UFO-L. These patterns are applied, either by extension or analogy with legal rules, for building the domain layer. CargO-S is then validated by implementing the ontology as OWL and SWRL rules. Finally, the performance and the semantic accuracy of CargO-S are evaluated using a dual evaluation approach.

The Landscape of Ontology Reuse Approaches

Ontology reuse aims to foster interoperability and facilitate knowledge reuse. Several approaches are typically evaluated by ontology engineers when bootstrapping a new project. However, current practices are often motivated by subjective, case-by-case decisions, which hamper the definition of a recommended behaviour. In this chapter we argue that to date there are no effective solutions for supporting developers’ decision-making process when deciding on an ontology reuse strategy. The objective is twofold: (i) to survey current approaches to ontology reuse, presenting motivations, strategies, benefits and limits, and (ii) to analyse two representative approaches and discuss their merits.

Deductive Module Extraction for Expressive Description Logics

In deductive module extraction, we determine a small subset of an ontology for a given vocabulary that preserves all logical entailments that can be expressed in that vocabulary. While in the literature stronger module notions have been discussed, we argue that for applications in ontology analysis and ontology reuse, deductive modules, which are decidable and potentially smaller, are often sufficient. We present methods based on uniform interpolation for extracting different variants of deductive modules, satisfying properties such as completeness, minimality and robustness under replacements, the latter being particularly relevant for ontology reuse. An evaluation of our implementation shows that the modules computed by our method are often significantly smaller than those computed by existing methods.

LETHE: Forgetting and Uniform Interpolation for Expressive Description Logics

Uniform interpolation and forgetting describe the task of projecting a given ontology into a user-specified vocabulary, that is, of computing a new ontology that only uses names from a specified set of names, while preserving all logical entailments that can be expressed with those names. This is useful for ontology analysis, ontology reuse and privacy. Lethe is a tool for performing uniform interpolation on ontologies in expressive description logics, and it can be used from the command line, using a graphical interface, and as a Java library. It furthermore implements methods for computing logical difference and performing abduction using uniform interpolation. We present the tool together with an evaluation on a varied corpus of realistic ontologies.

A Methodology for Ontology Reuse

There is an abundance of existing biomedical ontologies such as the National Cancer Institute Thesaurus and the Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine-Clinical Terms. Implementing these ontologies in a particular system however, may cause unnecessary high usage of memory and slows down the systems' performance. On the other hand, building a new ontology from scratch will require additional time and efforts. Therefore, this research explores the ontology reuse approach in order to develop an Abdominal Ultrasound Ontology by extracting concepts from existing biomedical ontologies. This article presents the reader with a step by step method in reusing ontologies together with suggestions of the off-the-shelf tools that can be used to ease the process. The results show that ontology reuse is beneficial especially in the biomedical field as it allows for developers from the non-technical background to build and use domain specific ontology with ease. It also allows for developers with technical background to develop ontologies with minimal involvements from domain experts.