Definition Of Ontology Research Articles

Inconsistent Ontology Handling by Translating Description Logics into Defeasible Logic Programming

The Semantic Web is a future vision of the web where stored information has exact meaning, thus enabling computers to understand and reason on the basis of such information. Assigning semantics to web resources is addressed by means of ontology definitions which are meant to be written in an ontology description language such as OWL-DL that is based on so-called Description Logics (DL). Although ontology definitions expressed in DL can be processed with existing DL reasoners, such DL reasoners are incapable of dealing with inconsistent ontology definitions. Previous research has determined that a subset of DL can be eectively translated into an equivalent subset of logic programming. We propose a method for dealing with inconsistent ontology definitions in the Semantic Web. Our proposal involves mapping DL ontologies into DeLP programs. That is, given an OWL-DL ontologyOOwl, an equivalent DL ontologyODL can be obtained. ProvidedODL satisfies certain restrictions, it can be translated into a DeLP program ODeLP. Therefore, given a query Q w.r.t. OOwl, a dialectical process will be performed to determine if Q is warranted w.r.t.ODeLP.

Extracting knowledge from XML document repository: a semantic Web-based approach

XML plays an important role as the standard language for representing structured data for the traditional Web, and hence many Web-based knowledge management repositories store data and documents in XML. If semantics about the data are formally represented in an ontology, then it is possible to extract knowledge: This is done as ontology definitions and axioms are applied to XML data to automatically infer knowledge that is not explicitly represented in the repository. Ontologies also play a central role in realizing the burgeoning vision of the semantic Web, wherein data will be more sharable because their semantics will be represented in Web-accessible ontologies. In this paper, we demonstrate how an ontology can be used to extract knowledge from an exemplar XML repository of Shakespeare's plays. We then implement an architecture for this ontology using de facto languages of the semantic Web including OWL and RuleML, thus preparing the ontology for use in data sharing. It has been predicted that the early adopters of the semantic Web will develop ontologies that leverage XML, provide intra-organizational value such as knowledge extraction capabilities that are irrespective of the semantic Web, and have the potential for inter-organizational data sharing over the semantic Web. The contribution of our proof-of-concept application, KROX, is that it serves as a blueprint for other ontology developers who believe that the growth of the semantic Web will unfold in this manner.

Surgical models for computer-assisted neurosurgery

In this paper, we outline a way to improve computer-assisted neurosurgery using surgical models along with patient-specific models built from multimodal images. We propose a methodological framework for surgical models that include the definition of a surgical ontology, the development of software for describing surgical procedures based on this ontology and the analysis of these descriptions to generate knowledge about surgical practice. Knowledge generation is illustrated by two studies. One hundred fifty-nine patients who underwent brain tumor surgery were described from postoperative reports using the surgical ontology. First, from a subset of 106 surgical cases, we computed a decision tree using a prediction approach that gave probability in terms of operating room patient positioning percentages and according to tumor location within one or more lobes. Second, from the whole set of 159 surgical cases, we identified 6 clusters describing families of cases according to pathology-related parameters. Results from both studies showed possible prediction of parts of the surgical procedure from pathology-related characteristics of the patient. Surgical models enable surgical knowledge to be made explicit, facilitating the surgical decision-making process and surgical planning and improving the human–computer interface during surgery.

Research on the knowledge management architecture of LCED based ontologies and multi-agent system

Life cycle engineering design (LCED) is the key and comprehensive technology to realize manufacturing industries’ sustainable development. Its main objective is to support design teams to create products considering the entire product life-cycle from conception through manufacturing and assembly to disassembly, recycling, disposal, and lifecycle assessment. So LCED should be collaboratively implemented among the different departments. This paper puts forward knowledge management architecture of LCED based ontologies and multi-agent system. The definition of the domain-specific ontology, the multi-agent architecture are described. Based on the two concepts, this paper discusses the detailed construction of CAD agents, LCED evaluation agents and knowledge maintenance agents and the system implementation. It can fulfill the concurrent collaborative developing of a product under distributed environments and also meet the requirement of knowledge sharing, interoperability, reusing among the whole lifecycle of product.

Assessing the Certainty of Locations Produced by an Address Geocoding System

Addresses are the most common georeferencing resource people use to communicate to others a location within a city. Urban GIS applications that receive data directly from citizens, or from legacy information systems, need to be able to quickly and efficiently obtain a spatial location from addresses. In this paper we understand addresses in a broader perspective, in which not only the conventional elements of postal addresses are considered, but other kinds of direct or indirect references to places, such as building names, postal codes, or telephone area codes, which are also valuable as locators to urban places. This broader view on addresses allows us to work with two perspectives. First, in the ontological definition, modeling, and implementation of an addressing database that is flexible enough to accommodate the variety of concepts and address formats used worldwide, along with direct and indirect references to places. Second, in the definition of an indicator that is able to quantify the degree of certainty that could be reached when a user-given, semi-structured address is geocoded into a spatial position, as a function of the type and completeness of the available addressing data and of the geocoding method that has been employed. This indicator, which we call Geocoding Certainty Indicator (GCI), can be used as a threshold, beyond which the geocoded event should be left out of any statistical analysis, or as a weight that allows spatial analysis methods to reduce the influence of events that have been less reliably located. In order to support geocoding activities and the determination of the GCI, we propose a conceptual schema for addressing databases. The schema is flexible enough to accommodate a variety of addressing systems, at various levels of detail, and in different countries. Our intention is to depart from the usual geocoding strategy employed in commercial GIS products, which is usually limited to the average American or British address format. The schema also extends the notion of postal address to something broader, including popular names for places, building names, reference places, and other concepts. This approach extends Simpson’s and Yu’s Comput. Environ. Urban Syst., 27: 283–307, 2003 work on postal codes to records of any kind, including place names and loosely formatted addresses.

ONTOLOGY-BASED PRODUCTS INFORMATION INTEROPERABILITY IN NETWORKED MANUFACTURING ENTERPRISES

AbstractStandardisation initiatives (ISO and IEC) try to answer the problem of managing heterogeneous information, scattered within organizations, by formalising the knowledge related to products technical data. While the product is the centred object from which, along its life cycle, all enterprise systems, either inside a single enterprise or between cooperating networked enterprises, have a specific view, we may consider it as active as far as it participates to the decisions making by providing knowledge about itself. This paper proposes a novel approach, postulating that the product, represented by its technical data, may be considered as interoperable per se with the many applications involved in manufacturing enterprises as far as it embeds knowledge about itself, as it stores all its technical data, provided that these are embedded on a common model. The matter of this approach is to formalise of all technical data and concepts contributing to the definition of a Product Ontology, embedded into the product itself and making it interoperable with applications, minimising loss of semantics.

The Perils of Marriage as Transcendent Ontology: National Pride at Work v. Governor of Michigan

National Pride at Work v. Governor of Michigan provides a unique opportunity to watch as courts struggle to define marriage. This is not a suit seeking recognition of same-sex marriages. It presents the question of whether an amendment to the Michigan state constitution prohibiting recognition of same-sex marriages or any union that is similar to also prohibits public employers in the state from conferring benefits on the same-sex partners of their employees. The trial and appeals courts came to exactly opposite conclusions, and their respective positions nicely demarcate the options in what promises to be an ongoing debate in the many states that now have statutes or constitutional amendments prohibiting recognition of same-sex marriages. This article demonstrates how the trial court adhered strictly to the amendment itself and state statutes, while the appeals court covertly imported an ontological definition of marriage that relies more on the judges' personal philosophies than on the relevant law.

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A new approach to a local e-government portal for information management and deep searching

The paper introduces a new approach, that is, semantic Web techniques, to shed a new light on the solutions for local e-government information portal. After taking the comparison between traditional approaches and semantic approaches, the design of architecture and components of a local e-government information portal are illustrated in details based on semantic technologies. The paper also researches on the core technologies of implementation of the new approach, including the definition of e-government information portal Ontologies and searching algorithms.

The Event Construct in Active Information Systems

The Event Construct in Active Information Systems Salvatore T. March Vanderbilt University Gove N. Allen Tulane University Abstract Organizations and the information systems that support them are artificial and intentionally designed artifacts. Policies and procedures created by an organization define how specific events affect the states of things about which the organization is concerned. Active information systems are designed to participate in the operation and management of organizational processes. They calculate and ascribe state to material and artificial things according to rules designed by the organization and activated when identified events occur. The ontological definition of an event as a state-transition proscribes the representation of events as entities. The resultant conceptualization of an information system as a state-tracking mechanism obscures the critical role that events play in active information systems. Effective analysis and design of such systems requires a more substantive ontological definition of an event as an entity having both identity and properties. Included in an event's properties are the rules that govern state transitions caused by the event. The resultant conceptualization of an information system is an event-processing mechanism, actively interpreting and re-interpreting events with respect to extant and posed rules. This ontological definition treats things and events uniformly as entities enabling them to have appropriate representations at the conceptual level. It provides a context in which learning can be represented through the definition, identification, and classification of critical events and the evaluation and evolution of rules governing their effects. Additional research is needed to develop and evaluate conceptual modeling grammars and methods that implement this event conceptualization within an information system development methodology. March 22, 2006

The Ontological Treatment of the 'Event' Construct: Implications for System Analysis and Design

Information systems are integral to the management of business and organizational processes. They perform calculations and ascribe values to material and artificial things according to rules designed by the organization and activated when identified events occur. The ontological definition of an event as a state-transition results in the conceptualization of an information system as a state-tracking mechanism. It precludes the representation of events as entities at the conceptual level. Hence, the rules which are often central to the operations of the organization have no conceptual representation. A more substantive ontological definition of an event as an entity having identity and properties results in the conceptualization of an information system as an event-tracking mechanism, giving events and the rules that govern state-transitions the appropriate, central representation at the conceptual level.

MDA-based Automatic OWL Ontology Development

This paper presents an eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformation (XSLT)-based approach for automatic generation of the Web Ontology Language (OWL) from a UML model. Similar solutions that treat this problem are mostly partial since they do not use full metamodeling potentials. Although they emphasize the notion of the use UML for ontology development and propose necessary transformations into Semantic Web languages (e.g., RDF Schema, DAML, DAML+OIL), their UML models must be further refined using ontology-specialized tool. None of these approaches enables instance modeling and generation of OWL ontologies. In our efforts to make ontological and software engineering techniques closer, we have firstly defined ontology metamodeling architecture using Model Driven Architecture (MDA) concepts. This architecture consists of the Ontology Definition Metamodel defined using Meta Object Facility (MOF) and based on the OWL, as well as the related Ontology UML Profile (OUP). A transformation, that we present here, extends this metamodeling architecture and transforms an ontology from its OUP definition (i.e., XML Metadata Interchange – XMI) into the OWL description. Accordingly, we illustrate how an OUP-developed ontology can be shared with ontological engineering tools (i.e., Protege).

Productions of social solidarity and of social compulsion

I begin from the assumption that the social groups within which people acquire subjective attributes belong to two different orders. Those of the first order follow the model of organized, closed structures that define fixed places. Examples are social institutions, the state, and the oedipal structure. The groups of the second order are ad hoc groups whose life and consistency depend on the emergence of a problem that must be solved and, therefore, on a doing together. I call these groups communities. This approach to the matter of globalization responds to a way of thinking linkage organization that privileges different ontologies and a characteristic topology for each of them. We should ask ourselves whether solidarity requires an ontological definition; whether it constitutes an ethical problem (commitment), a moral problem (behaviour or obligation), an action/doing based on a previous knowledge of one of the parties, a practice created in connection with an emerging problem, a psychic mechanism, and so on. To answer these manifold questions, I travel a path – one among many possible paths – that involves understanding solidarity as a resource and a practice referred to psychic suffering, especially in present-day Argentina. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons. Ltd.

Quality control for terms and definitions in ontologies and taxonomies.

BackgroundOntologies and taxonomies are among the most important computational resources for molecular biology and bioinformatics. A series of recent papers has shown that the Gene Ontology (GO), the most prominent taxonomic resource in these fields, is marked by flaws of certain characteristic types, which flow from a failure to address basic ontological principles. As yet, no methods have been proposed which would allow ontology curators to pinpoint flawed terms or definitions in ontologies in a systematic way.ResultsWe present computational methods that automatically identify terms and definitions which are defined in a circular or unintelligible way. We further demonstrate the potential of these methods by applying them to isolate a subset of 6001 problematic GO terms. By automatically aligning GO with other ontologies and taxonomies we were able to propose alternative synonyms and definitions for some of these problematic terms. This allows us to demonstrate that these other resources do not contain definitions superior to those supplied by GO.ConclusionOur methods provide reliable indications of the quality of terms and definitions in ontologies and taxonomies. Further, they are well suited to assist ontology curators in drawing their attention to those terms that are ill-defined. We have further shown the limitations of ontology mapping and alignment in assisting ontology curators in rectifying problems, thus pointing to the need for manual curation.

Semantic learning designs: recording assumptions and guidelines

AbstractRecent developments in the standardisation of learning technology have resulted in models of learning activities and resources including descriptive metadata and definitions of conditional flows for multirole activities. Nonetheless, such learning designs are actually representations of the results of the design process and do not provide information about the rationale of the design, ie, about the theoretical standpoints, assumptions or guidelines applied to come up with the concrete arrangement of activities. These latter elements are critical not only for informative reasons, but as a medium towards the end of connecting theories and hypotheses to actual practice and analysing the resulting empirical data as a form of inquiry on the validity of theoretical assumptions. This paper delineates the main aspects of a schema for the recording of such design rationales using an ontological approach. The method for the engineering of the schema was based on connecting the definitions provided with an existing large ontological base, thus reusing a large amount of common sense knowledge. Two paradigmatic example positions of the range of aspects that could be covered by the representation language are described as an illustration. The resulting ontological definitions can be used as a foundation for the refinement of theoretical positions and for their comparative assessment.

Functional Genomic Responses to Cystic Fibrosis Transmembrane Conductance Regulator (CFTR) and CFTRΔ508 in the Lung

Cystic fibrosis (CF), a common lethal pulmonary disorder in Caucasians, is caused by mutations in the cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator gene (CFTR) that disturbs fluid homeostasis and host defense in target organs. The effects of CFTR and delta508-CFTR were assessed in transgenic mice that 1) lack CFTR expression (Cftr-/-); 2) express the human delta508 CFTR (CFTR(delta508)); 3) overexpress the normal human CFTR (CFTR(tg)) in respiratory epithelial cells. Genes were selected from Affymetrix Murine Gene-Chips analysis and subjected to functional classification, k-means clustering, promoter cis-elements/modules searching, literature mining, and pathway exploring. Genomic responses to Cftr-/- were not corrected by expression of CFTR(delta508). Genes regulating host defense, inflammation, fluid and electrolyte transport were similarly altered in Cftr-/- and CFTR(delta508) mice. CFTR(delta508) induced a primary disturbance in expression of genes regulating redox and antioxidant systems. Genomic responses to CFTR(tg) were modest and were not associated with lung pathology. CFTR(tg) and CFTR(delta508) induced genes encoding heat shock proteins and other chaperones but did not activate the endoplasmic reticulum-associated degradation pathway. RNAs encoding proteins that directly interact with CFTR were identified in each of the CFTR mouse models, supporting the hypothesis that CFTR functions within a multiprotein complex whose members interact at the level of protein-protein interactions and gene expression. Promoters of genes influenced by CFTR shared common regulatory elements, suggesting that their co-expression may be mediated by shared regulatory mechanisms. Genes and pathways involved in the response to CFTR may be of interest as modifiers of CF.

Definition of a web ontology for design-oriented material selection

The CODATA Data Science Journal is a peer-reviewed, open access, electronic journal, publishing papers on the management, dissemination, use and reuse of research data and databases across all research domains, including science, technology, the humanities and the arts. The scope of the journal includes descriptions of data systems, their implementations and their publication, applications, infrastructures, software, legal, reproducibility and transparency issues, the availability and usability of complex datasets, and with a particular focus on the principles, policies and practices for open data.All data is in scope, whether born digital or converted from other sources.

System and method for deriving natural language representation of formal belief structures

A conversation manager processes spoken utterances from a user of a computer, and develops responses to the spoken utterances. The conversation manager includes a reasoning facility and a language generation module. Each response has a domain model associated with it. The domain model includes an ontology (i.e., world view for the relevant domain of the spoken utterances and responses), lexicon, and syntax definitions. The language generation module receives a response in the form of a formal belief structure from other components of the conversation manager. The reasoning facility selects a syntax template to use in generating a response output from the formal belief structure. The language generation module produces the response output based on the formal structure, the selected syntax template, and the domain model.

APPLYING SEMANTIC MODELLING TECHIQUES IN LARGE SCALE PROCESS SIMULATION

Large scale process simulation is used in industry for e.g. process and automation design, automation testing, safety analyses and for operator training and support purposes. In modern computing environments very large dynamic process models of an entire plant can be calculated in real time or even faster than real time. However current process simulation environments are separate tools that rarely have links to the other information management tools of a plant delivery project. In this paper we present an approach where semantic modelling techniques (semantic web) are used within an ontology definition environment. In this environment different plant modelling and simulation ontologies can be mapped and used together without compromising computational speed and scalability. Ontology of one simulation solver type, namely companion model solver, is discussed as an example.

Set-up and maintenance of ontologies for innovation support in extended enterprises

The effective generation, sharing and re-use of innovation knowledge play an increasingly crucial role in the competitiveness of industrial enterprises allowing the companies to offer new solutions based on rapidly exploited innovations. As the innovation knowledge is by its nature very unstructured and manifold in its definition, solutions for effective exchange and sharing of such knowledge within collaboration networks of extended enterprises are still missing. This paper presents a set of new methods and IT tools to support efficient and smooth exchange of innovation knowledge in extended and networked enterprises. The methods and tools are based on so-called hybrid approach in definition of ontologies needed as a basis for knowledge sharing within a network of companies. The developed tools enable efficient set-up, harmonisation and maintenance of generic, shared ontologies. The solutions are tested within a large manufacturing enterprise involving several subsidiaries.