The development of domain ontological models, though being a mature research arena backed by well-established methodologies, still suffer from two key shortcomings. Firstly, the issues concerning the semantic persistency of ontology concepts and their flexible reuse in domain development employing existing approaches. Secondly, due to the difficulty in understanding and reusing top-level concepts in existing foundational ontologies, the obfuscation regarding the semantic nature of domain representations. The paper grounds the aforementioned shortcomings in representation diversity and proposes a three-fold solution - (i) a pipeline for rendering concepts reuse-ready, (ii) a first characterization of a minimalistic foundational knowledge model, named foundational teleology, semantically explicating foundational distinctions enforcing the static as well as dynamic nature of domain representations, and (iii) a flexible, reuse-native methodology for diversity-aware domain development exploiting solutions (i) and (ii). The preliminary work reported validates the potentiality of the solution components.

Among a variety of other considerations, energy efficiency is a major focus for the Union's ultimate decarbonization. This makes high energy efficiency a critical priority for all energy sectors, particularly the residential sector [2], which occupies more than a quarter of the Union's total final energy consumption. Energy decentralization has emerged as one of the most popular contemporary research topic in this domain as a mean for increasing energy efficiency [3]. With the growing usage of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in the Internet of Things (IoT) sector, data on household energy consumption and production (HECP) may now be generated in a decentralized manner, for example, from an electric vehicle, a heat pump, or home appliances. Due to the range and granularity of data-generating devices, a new generation of smart household energy systems is geared toward decentralization and has the potential to considerably assist in the transition to a sustainable energy future [4, 5]. On the other hand, evaluating household energy data is getting increasingly difficult as a result of various smart devices interacting and forming a complex energy flow data network [6, 7]. Decentralized energy systems are often paired with research into data-driven technologies (e.g. machine learning) for opti-2 mizing the systems based on the massive ocean of incoming data in order to manage the inherent risk associated with energy usage's intermittent and unpredictable nature and achieve energy sustainability, including cost reduction, emission reduction, and energy efficiency. However, most of those technologies are developed for project-specific decentralized data (i.e.

Interoperability issues concerning observational data have gained attention in recent times. Automated data integration is important when it comes to the scientific analysis of observational data from different sources. However, it is hampered by various data interoperability issues. We focus exclusively on semantic interoperability issues for observational characteristics. We propose a use-case-driven approach to identify general classes of interoperability issues. In this paper, this is exemplarily done for the use-case of citizen science fireball observations. We derive key concepts for the identified interoperability issues that are generalizable to observational data in other fields of science. These key concepts contain several modeling challenges, and we broadly describe each modeling challenges associated with its interoperability issue. We believe, that addressing these challenges with a set of ontology design patterns will be an effective means for unified semantic modeling, paving the way for a unified approach for resolving interoperability issues in observational data. We demonstrate this with one design pattern, highlighting the importance and need for ontology design patterns for observational data, and leave the remaining patterns to future work. Our paper thus describes interoperability issues along with modeling challenges as a starting point for developing a set of extensible and reusable design patterns.

Smart and continuous commissioning (SCCx) of buildings can result in a significant reduction in the gap between design and operational performance. Ontologies play an important role in SCCx as they facilitate data readability and reasoning by machines. A better understanding of ontologies is required in order to develop and incorporate them in SCCx. This paper critically reviews the state-of-the-art research on building data ontologies since 2014 within the SCCx domain through sorting them based on building data types, general approaches, and applications. The data types of two main domains of building information modeling and building management system have been considered in the majority of existing ontologies. Three main applications are evident from a critical analysis of existing ontologies: (1) key performance indicator calculation, (2) building performance improvement, and (3) fault detection and diagnosis. The key gaps found in the literature review are a holistic ontology for SCCx and insight on how such approaches should be evaluated. Based on these findings, this study provides recommendations for future necessary research including: identification of SCCx-related data types, assessment of ontology performance, and creation of open-source approaches.

Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) are defined as a collection of highly stressful, and potentially traumatic, events or circumstances that occur throughout childhood and/or adolescence. They have been shown to be associated with increased risks of mental health diseases or other abnormal behaviours in later lives. However, the identification of ACEs from textual data with Natural Language Processing (NLP) is challenging because (a) there are no NLP ready ACE ontologies; (b) there are few resources available for machine learning, necessitating the data annotation from clinical experts; (c) costly annotations by domain experts and large number of documents for supporting large machine learning models. In this paper, we present an ontology-driven self-supervised approach (derive concept embeddings using an auto-encoder from baseline NLP results) for producing a publicly available resource that would support large-scale machine learning (e.g., training transformer based large language models) on social media corpus. This resource as well as the proposed approach are aimed to facilitate the community in training transferable NLP models for effectively surfacing ACEs in low-resource scenarios like NLP on clinical notes within Electronic Health Records. The resource including a list of ACE ontology terms, ACE concept embeddings and the NLP annotated corpus is available at https://github.com/knowlab/ACE-NLP.

Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) are defined as a collection of highly stressful, and potentially traumatic, events or circumstances that occur throughout childhood and/or adolescence. They have been shown to be associated with increased risks of mental health diseases or other abnormal behaviours in later lives. However, the identification of ACEs from free-text Electronic Health Records (EHRs) with Natural Language Processing (NLP) is challenging because (a) there is no NLP ready ACE ontologies; (b) there are limited cases available for machine learning, necessitating the data annotation from clinical experts. We are currently developing a tool that would use NLP techniques to assist us in surfacing ACEs from clinical notes. This will enable us further research in identifying evidence of the relationship between ACEs and the subsequent developments of mental illness (e.g., addictions) in large-scale and longitudinal free-text EHRs, which has previously not been possible.

Goal oriented dialogue systems were originally designed as a natural language interface to a fixed data-set of entities that users might inquire about, further described by domain, slots, and values. As we move towards adaptable dialogue systems where knowledge about domains, slots, and values may change, there is an increasing need to automatically extract these terms from raw dialogues or related non-dialogue data on a large scale. In this paper, we take an important step in this direction by exploring different features that can enable systems to discover realizations of domains, slots, and values in dialogues in a purely data-driven fashion. The features that we examine stem from word embeddings, language modelling features, as well as topological features of the word embedding space. To examine the utility of each feature set, we train a seed model based on the widely used MultiWOZ data-set. Then, we apply this model to a different corpus, the Schema-Guided Dialogue data-set. Our method outperforms the previously proposed approach that relies solely on word embeddings. We also demonstrate that each of the features is responsible for discovering different kinds of content. We believe our results warrant further research towards ontology induction, and continued harnessing of topological data analysis for dialogue and natural language processing research.

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) have shown to be very important for applications such as personal assistants, question-answering systems, and search engines. Therefore, it is crucial to ensure their high quality. However, KGs inevitably contain errors, duplicates, and missing values, which may hinder their adoption and utility in business applications, as they are not curated, e.g., low-quality KGs produce low-quality applications that are built on top of them. In this vision paper, we propose a practical knowledge graph curation framework for improving the quality of KGs. First, we define a set of quality metrics for assessing the status of KGs, Second, we describe the verification and validation of KGs as cleaning tasks, Third, we present duplicate detection and knowledge fusion strategies for enriching KGs. Furthermore, we give insights and directions toward a better architecture for curating KGs.

Many ontologies, i.e., Description Logic (DL) knowledge bases, have been developed to provide rich knowledge about various domains. An ontology consists of an ABox, i.e., assertion axioms between two entities or between a concept and an entity, and a TBox, i.e., terminology axioms between two concepts. Neural logical reasoning (NLR) is a fundamental task to explore such knowledge bases, which aims at answering multi-hop queries with logical operations based on distributed representations of queries and answers. While previous NLR methods can give specific entity-level answers, i.e., ABox answers, they are not able to provide descriptive concept-level answers, i.e., TBox answers, where each concept is a description of a set of entities. In other words, previous NLR methods only reason over the ABox of an ontology while ignoring the TBox. In particular, providing TBox answers enables inferring the explanations of each query with descriptive concepts, which make answers comprehensible to users and are of great usefulness in the field of applied ontology. In this work, we formulate the problem of neural logical reasoning across TBox and ABox (TA-NLR), solving which needs to address challenges in incorporating, representing, and operating on concepts. We propose an original solution named TAR for TA-NLR. Firstly, we incorporate description logic based ontological axioms to provide the source of concepts. Then, we represent concepts and queries as fuzzy sets, i.e., sets whose elements have degrees of membership, to bridge concepts and queries with entities. Moreover, we design operators involving concepts on top of fuzzy set representation of concepts and queries for optimization and inference. Extensive experimental results on two real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of TAR for TA-NLR.

How to build and use dialogue data efficiently, and how to deploy models in different domains at scale can be two critical issues in building a task-oriented dialogue system. In this paper, we propose a novel manual-guided dialogue scheme to alleviate these problems, where the agent learns the tasks from both dialogue and manuals. The manual is an unstructured textual document that guides the agent in interacting with users and the database during the conversation. Our proposed scheme reduces the dependence of dialogue models on fine-grained domain ontology, and makes them more flexible to adapt to various domains. We then contribute a fully-annotated multi-domain dataset MagDial to support our scheme. It introduces three dialogue modeling subtasks: instruction matching, argument filling, and response generation. Modeling these subtasks is consistent with the human agent's behavior patterns. Experiments demonstrate that the manual-guided dialogue scheme improves data efficiency and domain scalability in building dialogue systems. The dataset and benchmark will be publicly available for promoting future research.