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Standardisation for Nanotechnology

NQCG supports global standards by participating in their development and maintenance, and designing them into our products. Pursuing the latest in ontology engineering techniques and nanotechnological advancement, NQCG is working with the standards development organisations, industry and the research community world wide to help facilitate growth and expansion of nanotechnology into industry as a whole.

NQCG participates in National and International Standards Development Organizations

Current Work Processes for Standardisation

Most standardisation work for terms and definitions in related technical domains relies on nationally / internationally consensus decision making process
Experts meet to discuss individual opinions on terms and definitions covering technical fields of investigation for defining, developing, maintaining and enhancing standards
This is very time consuming work done by human experts representing organisations often with conflicting interests
ISO/TC 229 (Standardisation for Nanotechnology) coordinates international work in standardisation for nanotechnology
ISO/TC 229 JWG1 (ISO/IEC) coordinates standardisation work in terminology and nomenclature for nanotechnology

Are changes needed?

What can be done to improve the current way of defining, developing, maintaining and enhancing standards?
Can machine intelligence support human experts in international standardisation work?
What are the criteria, if any, for machine augmented standardisation work processes in a social and political context?

New Technologies for Standardisation work

Development of unambiguous and uniform terminology and nomenclature in the field of nanotechnologies to facilitate communication and to promote common understanding, can be undertaken more efficient through use of new methodologies and tools
New ways of representing terminologies and nomenclatures through use of new technologies

The Concept of Ontologies

Ontology is the branch of philosophy that answers the question “what is there?”
An ontology is a conceptualisation of a domain
An ontology is typically a hierarchical collection of classes, permissible relationships amongst those classes, and inference rules/constraints that is shared by a community 
An ontology reflects a community’s common understanding of a domain

Ontology for Standardisation

Ontologies are formal machine-understandable representations of terminologies
Nanotechnology standards may be represented as ontologies
The dynamic and complex nature of nanotechnology necessitates strong tool support
Tools for ontology engineering and evolution are available

Strategies for Ontology Engineering

Motivation
- Ontology used manually
- Ontology used in applications
- Ontology reasoning: consistency & completeness checks, etc.
Scope and granularity
- Choice of sub-domain (scope: e.g. nano-scale electrotechnical products and systems or photonics components and systems)
- Level of detail (to be defined by domain experts, typically in cooperation with standards bodies, industry groups and scientific unions)
Organisation
- Ontology engineering management
- Harmonising international standards
Ontology maintenance organisation
- Coincidence with standards bodies and scientific uniouns
Responsibilities and ownership
- Ownership of ontology
  - Freely available
Ontology approval procedures
- Organised within standards bodies
Frequency or rules for ontology maintenance
- To be decided by standards bodies
Ontology principles
- Choice of ontology markup language: OWL 2, RDF, etc.
- Modeling preferences: taxonomic structures, relationships, etc.
- Quality metrics

Methodology for Ontology Engineering

Initial ontology setup

Project organisation
- Purpose
- Organisation
- Responsibilities
- Scope & granularity
Identification of data sources
- Existing terminology standards
- Existing relevant ontologies
- Domain experts
Representative document sets
- Initial modeling
- Upper level ontology structure
- Inclusion of existing ontologies
- Definition of ontology modeling standard

Ontology learning
- Mapping of existing standards to ontology structures (Ontology Alignment and Mediation)
- Learning ontology structures from unstructured, semi-structured and structured text
- Ranking candidates for concepts, instances relationships, taxonomic hierarchies, etc.
Verification & correction in teams of domain experts and ontology experts
- Initial modeling
- Ontology editor (e.g. Protege)
- Ontology verification tools (e.g. Pellet)
Approval of ontology (fragment)
- Standards bodies
- Industry groups
- Scientific unions
- Science and technology policy
- Regulatory and patent authorities

Ontology Learning Approach

Extraction of ontology elements

Classes: Generic terms/concepts that describe a possible set of entities, e.g. computer
Individuals: Identifiable entities that are instances of one or more classes, e.g. my laptop
Properties: Relationships between classes or individuals, or attributes of classes or individuals

Relevant learning techniques

Named entity recognition and lexicon lookup to identify individuals from classes
Linguistic processing to remove syntactic and morphologic variation in text
Frequency-based methods (e.g. term frequency–inverse document frequency) to extract and rank candidate classes and individuals
Structure-based methods to recognize classes and instances from headings, item lists, etc.
Co-occurrence methods (e.g. association rules, cosine similarity) to extract relationships from co-occurring terms in documents
Clustering and linguistic patterns (e.g. Hearst patterns like ”is a”) to extract taxonomic hierarchies

Why a Nanotechnology Ontology?

Suitability of ontologies for domain
- Scientific vocabularies
- Multiple scientific disciplines involved
- Dynamically changing terminologies
- Benefits of using ontologies
Structured approach to terminology definition and maintenance
- Precise terminology definitions
- Automatic tools for verification of and reasoning about terminologies
- Machine-understandable terminologies

Want to learn more about how ontology learning and evolution techniques can be used to develop, maintain and use nanotechnology standards more efficient?

Please contact us to learn how your organisation can benefit.

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