The Combination of Ontology-Driven Conceptual Modeling and Ontology Matching for Building Domain Ontologies: E-Government Case Study

ABSTRACT

During the last decade, ontology engineering has undoubtedly participated in a lot of beneficial applications in different domains. Nevertheless, ontology development still faces several significant challenges that need to be addressed. This study proposes an enhanced architecture for the ontology development lifecycle. With the help of this architecture, users can complete ontology development tasks since it provides guidance for all key activities, from requirement specification to ontology evaluation. Ontology-driven conceptual modeling (ODCM) and ontology matching serve as the foundation of this architecture. ODCM is defined as the application of ontological ideas from various fields to build engineering objects that improve conceptual modeling. Ontology matching is a promising approach to overcome the semantic heterogeneity challenge between different ontologies. The proposed architecture is applied to e-governance domain, which is one of the online services that gains a great attention worldwide, especially during the coronavirus pandemic. However, residents of Arab countries face numerous obstacles and do not receive the full benefits of e-governance. For these reasons, Egyptian e-government is selected as the suggested case study. The results are encouraging when the produced ontology is compared with 20 existing ontologies from the same domain. On the basis of OntoMetrics, the average values of metrics correlated to accuracy, understandability, cohesion and conciseness lie in the 95th, 95th, 95th and 57th percentiles respectively. The results can be further enhanced by defining more non-inheritance relations and distributing the instances across all classes. © 2022. ISCA