[NOTE: For the latest information about Evolva, please check the website at: http://evolva.kmi.open.ac.uk]

Description

Evolva is an Ontology Evolution tool that handles information discovery from external data sources (e.g. text documents), data validation, ontology changes, evolution validation and evolution management. One of the advantages of Evolva is that it relies on various background knowledge sources (e.g. online ontologies and lexical databases) for knowledge integration. This article describes the installation of Evolva NeOn Toolkit Plug-in. The current implementation is still under development, and covers information discovery, data validation and ontological changes.

Prerequisites

Note: The plugin is currently only tested on a Mac operating system. We are in the process of making it operational on Windows.

• Mac OS
• Java 1.6
• NeOn Toolkit 1.2 (See below for download)
• GATE 4.0 (See below for download)
• WordNet 2.0 (See below for download)

Installation

• Download and install the NeOn Toolkit to "NEON-DIR" (e.g. /Applications/NeOnToolkit)
• Download the Evolva plugin jar file, and unzip the content into the "Plugins" directory of your NeOn Toolkit installation directory (i.e. "NEON-DIR"/plugins)
• Download and install GATE 4.0 to "GATE-DIR" (e.g. /Applications/GATE)
• Download and install WordNet 2.0 to "WN-DIR" (e.g. /Applications/WordNet)
• Download and unzip 3rdParty.zip file (containing text2onto.properties and file_properties.xml) into the package content MacOS directory (i.e. "NEON-DIR"/NeOn Toolkit.app/Contents/MacOS)
• Edit text2onto.properties, and set: gate_dir="NEON-DIR"/uk.ac.open.kmi.evolva.neontoolkitplugin_X.X.X/3rdparty/gate/
  and set creole_dir="NEON-DIR"/uk.ac.open.kmi.evolva.neontoolkitplugin_X.X.X/3rdparty/gate/
• Update the file "eclipse.ini" in the NeOn Toolkit package content MacOS directory (NeOn Toolkit.app/Contents/MacOS) with the following:
  -clean
  -showlocation
  -vmargs
  -DentityExpansionLimit=6400000
  -Xms1200m
  -Xmx1200m
  -XX:MaxPermSize=250m
  -Dgate.home="GATE-DIR"/
  -Dgate.config="GATE-DIR"/gate.xml
  -Dgate.plugins.home="GATE-DIR"/plugins
  -Dload.plugin.path=file:"GATE-DIR"/plugins/ANNIE
• Launch the NeOn ToolKit.

User Documentation

Starting Evolva

• The user selects the ontology to Evolve, then presses on the Evolva button in the toolbar (highlighted in Red below):

• Evolva main panel shows the features of the plug-in:

Data sources

• Text documents: The user specifies the source of information for ontology evolution. Currently only text is supported, and in the future Evolva will be extended to handle folksonomies, databases and other ontologies.                            

Data Validation

• The data validation cleans and identifies new content to be added to the ontology. The user can modify the parameters and manually selects terms to include/exclude.

Relation Discovery

• At this level, new terms are linked to the ontology using various background knowledge sources. Currently WordNet and online ontologies (accessed through Scarlet based on Watson) are used. The user can change the parameters and manually choose relations to be used in the next step.
• Please note that when online ontologies are used as a source of background knowledge, the process will take a considerable amount of time depending on the size of ontology/data to process, and on the internet connection speed.

Ontology Changes

• A list of changes to be performed on the ontology is displayed to the user. Changes can be applied on the base ontology directly, or on a new version to which a timestamp is appended.

Licensing and User Agreement

The Evolva Plugin for the NeOn toolkit is distributed under the EPL license.

 

Acknowledgments

This work is funded by the NeOn project under European Commission grant no. IST-FF6-027595.

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