Levels Of Ontologies Research Articles

Visualization and analysis of schema and instances of ontologies for improving user tasks and knowledge discovery

Abstract Ontologies are an important resource for knowledge representation. Their structure can be complex due to role relations between several concepts, distinct attributes, and different instances. In this paper, we discuss a Visual Analytics solution, relying on the use of multiple coordinated views for exploring different ontology aspects and a novel use of the degree of interest (DoI) suppression technique to reduce the complexity of the ontology visual representation. Visual Analytics facilitates the understanding of the domain and tasks represented by ontologies, thus allowing to carry out exploratory analysis to optimize the comprehension of data semantics including non-explicit relationships between data. Through the DoI technique, we place the main concept in focus, distinguishing it from the unnecessary information and facilitating the analysis and understanding of correlated data. We evaluated all the devised solutions, and the results reinforce the importance of providing visualization and analysis techniques dedicated to the schema and instances levels of ontologies for the discovery of non-explicit information.

The properties of developing metadata ontologies for the media industry (based on the example of creating hardware conference-hall complexes)

This paper shows by analyzing a subject field (the classification of conference halls and the results of their elementary functional analysis) that the performance of assigned functions and the achievement of conference-service output features make it necessary to involve a large amount of information and the development of the structure of initial data and metadata, as well as the choice of the methods for creating metadata at different levels of ontologies. A universal approach to forming a metadata ontology is suggested, which can be used to develop the concept of equipping media-industry enterprises.

Thinking about Space‐Time Connections: Spatiotemporal Scheduling of Individual Activities

AbstractThis article presents a spatiotemporal model for scheduling applications that is driven by the events and activities individuals plan and manage every day. The framework is presented using an ontological approach where ontologies at different levels of generalization, e.g. domain, application, and task ontologies, are linked together through participation and inheritance relationships. S_Events are entered into a schedule as a new S_Entry, or modifications can be made to existing entries including reschedule, postpone, change location, and delete as schedules vary over time. These schedule updates are formalized through changes to planned start and end times and the planned locations of S_Entries are expressed using SWRL, a semantic web rule language. SWRL is also used for reasoning about schedule changes and the space‐time conflicts that can occur. The sequence of entries in a schedule gives rise to S_trajectories representing the locations that individuals plan to visit in order to carry out their schedule, adding an additional spatial element to the framework. A prototype Geoscheduler application maps S_Entries against a timeline, offering a spatiotemporal visualization of scheduled activities showing the evolution of a schedule over space‐time and affecting spatiotemporal accessibility for individuals.

THE APPLICATION OF A HIERARCHICAL TREE METHOD TO ONTOLOGY KNOWLEDGE ENGINEERING

Ontology technologies have been widely studied for their capabilities of semantic description and knowledge inference in a variety of application domains. The main obstacle for the advancement of ontologies is the immature building methods and construction principles. It is challenging to discover how to tune a large complete ontology to small applications and build domain ontologies pragmatically. This paper proposes a hierarchical tree method that provides guidelines to the building of a hierarchical geo-ontology and corresponding construction rules for different levels of ontologies. This hierarchical ontology construction method can be used to realize lower-level ontology building based on the restrictions of the upper-level ontology. It can also connect different levels of ontologies into a hierarchical structure. Based on the resulting hierarchical tree structure, the management and usage of ontologies becomes feasible and more efficient. Furthermore, to better elaborate the hierarchical relationships among the concepts surrounding the basic tree structure, this paper introduces Class Meta-Information (CMI) to OWL (Ontology Web Language) and uses Hierarchical Identification (HID) to draw conclusion on concepts' hierarchical relations. Examples, experimental simulation and comparative analyses are given to explain further the applications of this hierarchical tree method in the areas of ontology engineering.

Intelligent Systems and Knowledge Management (Part II)

This is the second special issue which focuses on “Intelligent Systems and Knowledge Management”. Intelligent systems refer broadly to computer embedded or controlled systems, machines and devices that possess a certain degree of intelligence. Much work in the area can be fairly characterized as integration on different levels of several technology directions intelligent control, artificial intelligence, decision support, soft computing, knowledge discovery,data mining, data fusion, knowledge engineering, ontologies, machine learning and neural networks – with challenging applications to complex systems. Knowledge management (KM) technology is used to rapidly capture, organize and deliver large amounts of corporate knowledge for business and/or e-learning processes. This special issue of the Journal of Computational Methods in Sciences and Engineering (JCMSE) invited authors to submit their original work that communicates current research on intelligent systems, regarding both the theoretical and methodological aspects, as well as various applications of intelligent approaches to many real world problems from science, technology or business. The first paper of this special issue proposes a collaborative ranking mechanism for efficient and personalized Internet search service provisioning. The second paper studies the perception of musical structure combined with mirror neuron (MN) system activation. In the light of this structure, let us be more descriptive. Traditional knowledge management is facing new problems triggered by the Web such as information overload, inefficient keyword searching, heterogeneous information integration and geographicallydistributed intranet problems etc.). In the first paper, M. Louta, I. Anagnostopoulos, I. Maglogiannis, and A. Michalas propose enhancements to the sophistication of the functionality that can be offered by search engine services. The authors propose a metasearch third-party result ranking mechanism, which is capable of adapting over the continuous changes that occur on the web, providing in parallel personalized information acquisition considering the user’s navigation behaviour. Transparency is achieved for both personalization and web evolution adaptation mechanisms, requiring virtually none effort from the user’s part. In essence, the proposed meta search engine rates, re-organises and combines the results acquired from search services for a specific user information resource request in accordance with a weighted combination of a performance related factor (tightly related to the ranking of the web result as given by the search engine service) and a reliability related factor (corresponding to the user satisfaction stemming from the specific web result that he/she browses), while the performance of each search engine with

Focal adhesion kinase is a load‐dependent governor of the slow contractile and oxidative muscle phenotype

Striated muscle exhibits a pronounced structural-functional plasticity in response to chronic alterations in loading. We assessed the implication of focal adhesion kinase (FAK) signalling in mechano-regulated differentiation of slow-oxidative muscle. Load-dependent consequences of FAK signal modulation were identified using a multi-level approach after electrotransfer of rat soleus muscle with FAK-expression plasmid vs. empty plasmid-transfected contralateral controls. Muscle fibre-targeted over-expression of FAK in anti-gravitational muscle for 9 days up-regulated transcript levels of gene ontologies underpinning mitochondrial metabolism and contraction in the transfected belly portion. Concomitantly, mRNA expression of the major fast-type myosin heavy chain (MHC) isoform, MHC2A, was reduced. The promotion of the slow-oxidative expression programme by FAK was abolished after co-expression of the FAK inhibitor FAK-related non-kinase (FRNK). Elevated protein content of MHC1 (+9%) and proteins of mitochondrial respiration (+165-610%) with FAK overexpression demonstrated the translation of transcript differentiation in targeted muscle fibres towards a slow-oxidative muscle phenotype. Coincidentally MHC2A protein was reduced by 50% due to protection of muscle from de-differentiation with electrotransfer. Fibre cross section in FAK-transfected muscle was elevated by 6%. The FAK-modulated muscle transcriptome was load-dependent and regulated in correspondence to tyrosine 397 phosphorylation of FAK. In the context of overload, the FAK-induced gene expression became manifest at the level of contraction by a slow transformation and the re-establishment of normal muscle force from the lowered levels with transfection. These results highlight the analytic power of a systematic somatic transgene approach by mapping a role of FAK in the dominant mechano-regulation of muscular motor performance via control of gene expression.

Using Ontologies for Integrated Geographic Information Systems

Today, there is a huge amount of data gathered about the Earth, not only from new spatial information systems, but also from new and more sophisticated data collection technologies. This scenario leads to a number of interesting research challenges, such as how to integrate geographic information of different kinds. The basic motivation of this paper is to introduce a GIS architecture that can enable geographic information integration in a seamless and flexible way based on its semantic value and regardless of its representation. The proposed solution is an ontology‐driven geographic information system that acts as a system integrator. In this system, an ontology is a component, such as the database, cooperating to fulfill the system’s objectives. By browsing through ontologies the users can be provided with information about the embedded knowledge of the system. Special emphasis is given to the case of remote sensing systems and geographic information systems. The levels of ontologies can be used to guide processes for the extraction of more general or more detailed information. The use of multiple ontologies allows the extraction of information in different stages of classification. The semantic integration of aerial images and GIS is a crucial step towards better geospatial modeling.