Semantic Similarity between Ontologies at Different Scales

In the past decade, existing and new knowledge and datasets have been encoded in different ontologies for semantic web and biomedical research. The size of ontologies is often very large in terms of number of concepts and relationships, which makes the analysis of ontologies and the represented knowledge graph computational and time consuming. As the ontologies of various semantic web and biomedical applications usually show explicit hierarchical structures, it is interesting to explore the trade-offs between ontological scales and preservation/precision of results when we analyze ontologies. This paper presents the first effort of examining the capability of this idea via studying the relationship between scaling biomedical ontologies at different levels and the semantic similarity values. We evaluate the semantic similarity between three gene ontology slims (plant, yeast, and candida, among which the latter two belong to the same kingdom-fungi) using four popular measures commonly applied to biomedical ontologies (Resnik, Lin, Jiang-Conrath, and SimRel). The results of this study demonstrate that with proper selection of scaling levels and similarity measures, we can significantly reduce the size of ontologies without losing substantial detail. In particular, the performances of Jiang-Conrath and Lin are more reliable and stable than that of the other two in this experiment, as proven by 1) consistently showing that yeast and candida are more similar (as compared to plant) at different scales, and 2) small deviations of the similarity values after excluding a majority of nodes from several lower scales. This study provides a deeper understanding of the application of semantic similarity to biomedical ontologies, and shed light on how to choose appropriate semantic similarity measures for biomedical engineering. © 2014 Chinese Association of Automation.

Orbiting Optimization Model for Tracking Voltage Security Region Boundary in Bulk Power Grids

A voltage security region(VSR)is a powerful tool for monitoring the voltage security in bulk power grids with high penetration of renewables.It can prevent cascading failures in wind power integration areas caused by serious over or low voltage problems.The bottlenecks of a VSR for practical applications are computational efficiency and accuracy.To bridge these gaps,a general optimization model for tracking a voltage security region boundary(VSRB)in bulk power grids is developed in this paper in accordance with the topological characteristics of the VSRB.First,the initial VSRB point on the VSRB is examined with the traditional OPF by using the base case parameters as initial values.Then,the rest of the VSRB points on the VSRB are tracked one after another,with the proposed optimization model,by using the parameters of the tracked VSRB point as the initial value to explore its adjacent VSRB point.The proposed approach can significantly improve the computational efficiency of the VSRB tracking over the existing algorithms,and case studies,in the WECC 9-bus and the Polish 2736-bus test systems,demonstrate the high accuracy and efficiency of the proposed approach on exploring the VSRB.