How To Teach Domain Ontology-based Knowledge Graph Construction? An Irish Experiment

Abstract

Domains represent concepts which belong to specific parts of the world. The particularized meaning of words linguistically encoding such domain concepts are provided by domain specific resources. The explicit meaning of such words are increasingly captured computationally using domain-specific ontologies, which, even for the same reference domain, are most often than not semantically incompatible. As information systems that rely on domain ontologies expand, there is a growing need to not only design domain ontologies and domain ontology-grounded Knowl­edge Graphs (KGs) but also to align them to general standards and conventions for interoperability. This often presents an insurmountable challenge to domain experts who have to additionally learn the construction of domain ontologies and KGs. Until now, several research methodologies have been proposed by different research groups using different technical approaches and based on scenarios of different domains of application. However, no methodology has been proposed which not only facilitates designing conceptually well-founded ontologies, but is also, equally, grounded in the general pedagogical principles of knowl­edge organization and, thereby, flexible enough to teach, and reproduce vis-à-vis domain experts. The purpose of this paper is to provide such a general, pedagogically flexible semantic knowl­edge modelling methodology. We exemplify the methodology by examples and illustrations from a professional-level digital healthcare course, and conclude with an evaluation grounded in technological parameters as well as user experience design principles.