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Ontology Overview

Name:	Cognitive Characteristics Ontology
Description:	The Cognitive Characteristics Ontology specification provides a vocabulary for describing cognitive pattern within contexts, their temporal dynamics and their origins, on/ for the Semantic Web.
Purpose:	Description of personal cognitive pattern in a simple and extended way.
Organization(s):
Author(s):	Dan Brickley, Libby Miller, Toby Inkster, Yi Zeng, Yan Wang, Danica Damljanovic, Zhisheng Huang, Sheila Kinsella, John Breslin, Bob Ferris
Justification	The Cognitive Characteristics Ontology is built on top of the Weighted Interests Vocabulary v0.5 and should probably substitute this ontology in the near future. That means all concepts and properties are imported from this ontology. Some of them are also redefined and renamed to broaden their meaning. Furthermore, the Cognitive Characteristics Ontology is inspired by the Unified User Context Model, the General User Model Ontology, the User Modelling for Information Retrieval Language and all their fundamental sources, and finally, the discussions on the FOAF developers mailing list. The Weighted Interests Vocabulary v0.5 is an union of the Weighted Interest Vocabulary, the E-foaf:interest Vocabulary and the Interest Mining Ontology. That means, all interest related ontologies are now merged under one hood and some concepts are proper modeled now. The design of this interest ontology is also strongly influenced by the outcome of the User (weighted) Interests Ontology working group from Hypios VoCamp Paris 2010.
Recommended by:
Submitted by:	BobFerris
Competency Questions:
Domains:	Personalization
Scenario:	User Profiling
Known issues:
OntologyURI:	http://purl.org/ontology/cco/core (15136)
Licensing:
Web references:
Other references:

Long Description

The Cognitive Characteristics Ontology includes two opportunities to model cognitive patterns. The first one is the representation of cognitive characteristics by using the semantic relation cco:cognitive_characteristic or better its more specialised sub properties (see graphic cco:cognitive_characteristic property as graph with relations) to associate the topics of the cognitive patterns to the users. The second opportunity is the property-oriented context reification of cco:cognitive_characteristic, cco:CognitiveCharacteristic, which is a general multiple purpose cognitive characteristic concept to describe cognitive patterns more in detail for a specific user or user group. As one can see in graphic cco:CognitiveCharacteristic concept as graph with relations, the specialised sub properties of cco:cognitive_characteristic, the cognitive patterns, currently are

   * interest (cco:interest), that means, a certain area of interest or preference, which is equivalent to foaf:topic_interest,
   * compentence (cco:competence), that means, the compentence to (be able to) do or know something or
   * setting (cco:setting), often regarding a specific environment, e.g. an application.

One can also refine the semantic relation of a competence association by using the sub properties of cco:competence, which are currently:

   * cco:skill: the ability or skill to (be able to) do something, e.g. to walk, to play the piano or to work in a team
   * cco:expertise: the knowledge or expertise in a certain domain or a specific topic, e.g. football, programming languages or music
   * cco:belief: an uncertain relation for competence representation, that means beliefs, persuasions or opinions, which can also be misconceptions

One can see the second opportunity to model cognitive patterns, cco:CognitiveCharacteristic in graphic cco:CognitiveCharacteristic concept as simplified graph with relations. This concept can be used to associate any foaf:Agent instance to (a) cco:CognitiveCharacteristic instance(s) with help of the properties cco:habit and cco:agent. The topics of a cco:CognitiveCharacteristic instance are related to it by using the property cco:topic, so that a property chain of cco:habit and cco:topic will also direct to topics of a cognitive pattern of an user or user group. That means, a statement that is modelled with the simple semantic relation approach based on cco:cognitive_characteristic can also be represented by an instance of cco:CognitiveCharacteristic, which has a cco:agent or cco:habit, a cco:topic and a cco:characteristic relation. The last property in this row is used to associate the applied cognitive pattern relation (sub properties of cco:cognitive_characteristic). Different statistics can be made on cognitive characteristics. These are currently:

   * cco:overall_weight, which reflects the overall interest in a topic and should be different from the actual weight (associated by the property wo:weight) of a cognitive characteristic
   * cco:longest_duration, which is the longest continuous interval of attention for a cognitive pattern, e.g. for an interest, if it appears in the following years: 1990, 1991, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 2001, then the longest duration is 4 years
   * cco:ultimative_duration, which is the overall duration of attention for a cognitive pattern, e.g. for an interest, if it appears in the following years: 1990, 1991, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 2001, then the longest duration is 7 years

Besides these statistics, one can also associate a concrete activity (by using the property cco:activity), to differentiate e.g. between football playing (topic = football; activity = playing) and football watching (topic = football; activity = watching), and further statistical items (by using the property cco:statistical_item) to a cognitive pattern description, which is itself also a sub class of scovo:Item. It is also important, to be able to describe dynamics of a cognitive characteristic. In the Cognitive Characteristics Ontology they can be described with help of the cco:CharacteristicDynamics concept, which is a sub class of wo:Weight, and can be related to a cco:CognitiveCharacteristic instance by using the property cco:characteristic_dynamics. Thereby, one can relate

   * concrete appear times (time instants or intervals, by using the property cco:appear_time), when a cognitive pattern gets attention by someone, or
   * an evidence description (by using the property cco:evidence), where this characteristic or dynamics was derived from.

to a cco:CognitiveCharacteristic or cco:characteristic_dynamics instance. Due to the two modelling opportunities of cognitive pattern in the Cognotive Characteristics Ontology, there is a need for formal semantics to associate statements with a shortcut relation and instances of the reification class that belonging together or to infer such knowledge with a reasoning engine. The Property Reification Vocabulary fulfil these requirements.

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• A blog post about the Cognitive Characteristics Ontology with examples and graphics. Weblog post | reference page