From Human- to LLM-Centered Collaborative Ontology Engineering

In the continuously evolving landscape of knowledge engineering, the symbiosis and teaming of humans and machines emerge as a pivotal new domain. This article explores the multifaceted realms of human and machine collaborative ontology engineering (OE). The goal of the presented work is to explore the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) to speed up and automate the processes of collaborative OE, experimenting with different levels of LLM involvement. The proposed approach is based on a human-centered approach, that is, the HCOME approach to collaborative OE, and follows a process of exploring the declining involvement of humans and the parallel increase of LLM involvement, concluding at a level of automation where the OE is exclusively performed by LLMs. This experimentation is organized based on a series of human/LLM collaboration levels (a spectrum of OE), each one aligned to a specific OE methodology, that is, Level-0 HCOME (Human), Level-1 X-HCOME (Human and LLMs), Level-2 SimX-HCOME (LLMs and Human), and Level-3 Sim-HCOME (LLMs). The evaluation of these methodologies (one per level) is performed by measuring the similarity of the generated ontologies against “reference” ontologies (precision, recall, and F1-score of reference-to-LLM-generated ontological mappings). The results presented in this paper demonstrate that while LLMs significantly expedite the OE process, the accuracy and completeness of the resulting ontologies are notably enhanced by maintaining a high level of human involvement. This study is expected to contribute to a deeper understanding of evolving dynamics in LLM-based/enhanced OE, paving the way for future advancements toward more effective collaborative OE frameworks.