Automatic Construction of OWL Ontologies From Petri Nets

Abstract

Ontology, as a formal representation method of domain knowledge, plays a particular important key role in semantic web. How to construct ontologies has become a key technology in the semantic web, especially constructing ontologies from existing domain knowledge. Currently, Petri nets have been a mathematical modeling tool, and have been widely studied and successfully applied in modeling of software engineering, database and artificial intelligence. In particular, PNML (Petri Net Markup Language) language has been a part of ISO/IEC Petri nets standard for representing and exchanging data on Petri nets. Therefore, how to construct ontologies from PNML model of Petri nets needs to be investigated. In this article, the authors investigate a method for automatic construction of web ontology language (OWL) ontologies from PNML of Petri nets. Firstly, this paper gives a formal definition and the semantics of PNML models of Petri nets. On this basis, a formal approach for constructing OWL ontologies from PNML model of Petri nets is proposed, i.e., this paper transforms Petri nets (including PNML model and PNML document of the Petri nets) into OWL ontologies at both structure and instance levels. Furthermore, the correctness of the transformation is proved. Finally, a prototype construction tool called PN2OWL is developed to transform Petri nets models into OWL ontologies automatically.