An approach to creating freeform spreadsheet ontology

The use of semantic technologies including ontologies is a widespread practice in modern intelligent system engineering. Spreadsheets are one of the most accessible and common ways of representing and storing information which are characterized by a wide variety and heterogeneity of layouts, styles and content while remaining a valuable source of domain knowledge. The paper proposes to automate the process of ontology engineering based on the analysis and transformation of spreadsheets with an arbitrary layout. For this purpose a new approach is presented that provides the restoration of the semantics of tabular data, conceptualization, and formalization of tabular content in the form of ontology. The main stages of the proposed approach and a description of the software are presented. The developed software was used to solve the practical problem of ontology engineering for diagnosing and assessing the technical condition of petrochemical equipment. Spreadsheets extracted from reports on industrial safety inspection of petrochemical complexes were used as the initial data. Based on the results of approbation, it was concluded that it is advisable to use the proposed approach when prototyping subject ontologies.