Ontology Instances Research Articles

Ontology Instance Matching based MPEG-7 Resource Integration

Heterogeneous multimedia contents are annotated by a sharable formal conceptualization, often called ontology, and these contents, regardless of their media, become sharable resources/instances. Integration of the sharable resources and acquisition of diverse knowledge is getting researchers’ attention at a rapid pace. In this regard, MPEG-7 standard convertible to semantic Resource Description Framework (RDF) evolves for containing structured data and knowledge sources. In this paper, the authors propose an efficient approach to integrate the multimedia resources annotated by the standard of MPEG-7 schema using ontology instance matching techniques. MPEG-7 resources are usually specified explicitly by their surrounding MPEG-7 schema entities, e.g., concepts and properties, in conjunction with other linked resources. Therefore, resource integration needed schema matching as well. In this approach, the authors obtained the schema matching using their scalable ontology alignment algorithm and collected the semantically linked resources, referred to as the Semantic Link Cloud (SLC) collectively for each of the resources. Techniques were addressed to solve several data heterogeneity: value transformation, structural transformation and logical transformation. These experiments show the strength and efficiency of the proposed matching approach.

A Generic and Synchronous Ontology-based Architecture for Collaborative Design

Today’s complex design projects require teams of designers to come together to facilitate the sharing of their respective expertise in order to produce effective design solutions. Due to the increasing need for exchanging knowledge, modern design projects are even more structured to work with virtual distributed teams that collaborate over computer networks to achieve global optima in design. This article presents an architecture where collaborative design is synchronously and generically achieved. That is, where particular representation models are transformed into ontology instances and merged together in order to accomplish the final product design. It is a synchronous approach because the merging process is undertaken at the same time that interaction among designers takes place. As supporting technologies, Web Ontology Language and Web Services are used to implement such an architecture.

TOWARDS AN INTELLIGENT TUTORING SYSTEM FOR ENVIRONMENTAL DECISION MAKERS

The paper presents a novel approach which aims to support the training of decision makers in maritime environmental pollution policies via an intelligent tutoring system that focuses on the automatic generation of self-assessment material. More specifically, the paper reports on the automatic construction of multiple-choice question tests from knowledge bases i.e. domain ontologies, instances, if-then rules, and multimedia objects. The reported work has been conducted with a prototype environmental pollution knowledge base (focused on maritime pollution with oil) representing ontology classes and instances in OWL language and rules in SWRL, capturing knowledge related to policies of diagnosis and response, and environmental-change events, for oil spill pollution.

Formal semantics-preserving translation from fuzzy ER model to fuzzy OWL DL ontology

Ontology is an important part of the W3C standards for the Semantic Web, and how to quickly and cheaply construct Web ontologies has become a key technology to enable the Semantic Web. However, information imprecision and uncertainty exist in many real-world applications, thus constructing fuzzy ontology by extracting domain knowledge from fuzzy database models (e.g., fuzzy ER model) can profitably support fuzzy ontology development. In this paper, we propose an approach for constructing fuzzy ontology from fuzzy ER model, in which the fuzzy ontology consists of fuzzy ontology structure and instances. Firstly, we give the formal definition and the semantics of fuzzy ER models. Then, we introduce the fuzzy extension of ontology language OWL DL, i.e., fuzzy OWL DL. Based on the fuzzy OWL DL, a kind of fuzzy ontology called fuzzy OWL DL ontology is presented. Furthermore, we consider the fuzzy ER schema and the corresponding database instances, and translate them into the fuzzy ontology structure and the fuzzy ontology instances, respectively. Finally, since a fuzzy OWL DL ontology is equivalent to a fuzzy Description Logic f-SHOIN(D) knowledge base, how the reasoning problems of fuzzy ER models (e.g., satisfiability, subsumption, and redundancy) may be reduced to reasoning on f-SHOIN(D) knowledge bases is investigated, which will further contribute to constructing fuzzy OWL DL ontology that exactly meet application's needs. Of course, the correctness of the translation and reasoning problems are proved completely.

KA-SB: from data integration to large scale reasoning.

BackgroundThe analysis of information in the biological domain is usually focused on the analysis of data from single on-line data sources. Unfortunately, studying a biological process requires having access to disperse, heterogeneous, autonomous data sources. In this context, an analysis of the information is not possible without the integration of such data.MethodsKA-SB is a querying and analysis system for final users based on combining a data integration solution with a reasoner. Thus, the tool has been created with a process divided into two steps: 1) KOMF, the Khaos Ontology-based Mediator Framework, is used to retrieve information from heterogeneous and distributed databases; 2) the integrated information is crystallized in a (persistent and high performance) reasoner (DBOWL). This information could be further analyzed later (by means of querying and reasoning).ResultsIn this paper we present a novel system that combines the use of a mediation system with the reasoning capabilities of a large scale reasoner to provide a way of finding new knowledge and of analyzing the integrated information from different databases, which is retrieved as a set of ontology instances. This tool uses a graphical query interface to build user queries easily, which shows a graphical representation of the ontology and allows users o build queries by clicking on the ontology concepts.ConclusionThese kinds of systems (based on KOMF) will provide users with very large amounts of information (interpreted as ontology instances once retrieved), which cannot be managed using traditional main memory-based reasoners. We propose a process for creating persistent and scalable knowledgebases from sets of OWL instances obtained by integrating heterogeneous data sources with KOMF. This process has been applied to develop a demo tool http://khaos.uma.es/KA-SB, which uses the BioPax Level 3 ontology as the integration schema, and integrates UNIPROT, KEGG, CHEBI, BRENDA and SABIORK databases.

Normative Appeals to the Natural

Surprisingly, many ethical realists and anti‐realists, naturalists and not, all accept some version of the following normative appeal to the natural (NAN): evaluative and normative facts hold solely in virtue of natural facts, where their naturalness is part of what fits them for the job. This paper argues not that NAN is false but that NAN has no adequate non‐parochial justification (a justification that relies only on premises which can be accepted by more or less everyone who accepts NAN) to back up this consensus. I show that we cannot establish versions of NAN which are interesting in their own right (and not merely as instances of a general naturalistic ontology) by appealing to the nature of natural properties or the kind of in‐virtue‐of relation to which NAN refers, plus other plausible non‐parochial assumptions. On the way, I distinguish different types of ‘in virtue of’ claims. I conclude by arguing that the way in which assessment of meta‐ethical hypotheses is theory‐dependent predicts the failure of non‐parochial justifications of NAN.

An FCA-based Solution for Ontology Mediation

In this paper, we present an ontology mediation solution based on the methods frequently used in Formal Concept Analysis. Our approach of mediation is based on the existence of instances associated to two source ontologies, then we can generate concepts in a new ontology if and only if they share the same extent. Hence our approach creates a merged ontology which captures the knowledge of these two source ontologies. The main contributions of this work are (i) to enable the creation of concepts not originally in the source ontologies, (ii) to propose a solution to label these emerging concepts and finally (iii) to optimize the resulting ontology by eliminating redundant or non pertinent concepts. Another contribution of this work is to emphasize that several forms of mediated ontology can be defined based on the relaxation of certain criteria produced from our method. The solution that we propose for tackling these issues is an automatic solution, meaning that it does not require the intervention of the end-user, excepting for the definition of the common set of ontology instances.

워드넷과 구글에 기반한 온톨로지 개체의 일반화

본 논문은 온톨로지의 지식을 확장하기 위하여 웹 페이지 등 텍스트에서 추출된 온톨로지 개체(ontology instances)를 일반화하는 방법을 제시한다. 이를 위해서는 단어 의미 중의성 해소 과정이 필수적인데, 구글, 워드넷과 같은 오픈 API와 어휘 리소스를 이용하여 비교사학습 방법으로 해결하는 방법을 제안한다. 실험 결과 기존 연구에 비해 15.8%의 성능 향상을 얻을 수 있었다. In order to populate ontology, this paper presents a generalization method of ontology instances, extracted from texts and web pages, by using unsupervised learning techniques for word sense disambiguation, which uses open APIs and lexical resources such as Google and WordNet. According to the experimental results, our method achieved a 15.8% improvement over the previous research.

AN INFERENCE-ENABLED ACCESS CONTROL MODEL FOR RDF ONTOLOGY

Although RDF ontologies are expressed based on XML syntax, existing methods to protect XML documents are not suitable for securing RDF ontologies. The graph style and inference feature of RDF ontologies demands new methods for access control. Driven by this goal, this paper proposes a query-oriented model for RDF ontology access control. The model adopts the concept of ontology view to rewrite user queries. In our approach, ontology views define accessible ontology concepts and instances a user can visit, and enables a controlled inference capability for the user. The design of the views guarantees that the views are free of conflict. Based on that, the paper describes algorithms for rewriting queries according to different views, and provides a system architecture along with an implemented prototype. In the evaluation, the system exhibits a promising result in terms of effectiveness and soundness.

Generating complex ontology instances from documents

This paper presents a novel Information Extraction system able to generate complex instances from free text available on the Web. The approach is based on a non-monotonical processing over ontologies, and makes use of entity recognizers and disambiguators in order to adequately extract and combine instances and their relations. Experiments conducted over the archaeology research domain provide encouraging results in both efficiency and efficacy and suggest that the tool is suitable for its application on other similar Semantic Web resources.

Adaptable, Distributed Ontology Alignment System

In the world of semantic web, ontology is used to describe the knowledge of a specific domain, through which agents can interact with each other. When an agent does not understand a similar, but different ontology instance, an ontology alignment system (OAS) aligns it for the agent to understand. An OAS is presented in this paper with: 1) adjustable (being able to add or to delete) matching strategy, making the aligned ontology instance truly suits the need of users, and 2) distributed processing that follows XML-RPC and that uses XML message format and HTTP POST transmission protocol, making OAS communication across platforms and languages so that different ontologies can be shared.

Categorisation of web documents using extraction ontologies

Automatically recognising which HTML documents on the Web contain items of interest for a user is non-trivial. As a step toward solving this problem, we propose an approach based on information-extraction ontologies. Given HTML documents, tables, and forms, our document recognition system extracts expected ontological vocabulary (keywords and keyword phrases) and expected ontological instance data (particular values for ontological concepts). We then use machine-learned rules over this extracted information to determine whether an HTML document contains items of interest. Experimental results show that our ontological approach to categorisation works well, having achieved F-measures above 90% for all applications we tried.

도메인지식의 계층화를 통한 온톨로지 인스턴스의 속성정보 추출

The ontology has been used widely in recent years with its aim to accumulate knowledge that machine can comprehend. We believe that machine can manage and analyze information on its own using the ontology. In this paper, we propose an algorithm that allows us to extract properties of ontology instances from structured information already existing in web documents. In particular, by stratification of the domain knowledge that is composed of property information, we were able to make the algorithm better and improve the quality of extraction results. In our experiments with 20 thousands targeted documents, we were able to extract property information with 83% confidence.

Ontology querying and its software component for design support in supply chains

Effective support of the product design stage in Supply Chain Management (SCM) is important for raising the competitive power of a company. Existing technology for design support of the supply chain has limitations in managing semantic data and handling logical operations, which agents will use for their intelligent and autonomous activities. In this paper, we suggest an ontology querying mechanism and a software component for it, based on the supply chain network, for the agent's intelligent activities. This querying engine can service several operations, including reasoning and logical functions, together with the ontology of the specified domain of product attributes and the ontology's instance data. We defined operators to provide the necessary ontology query according to the operation category in the domain of design support in the SCM, which will be provided as several interfaces in the form of server side components and web service. Finally, we explain the meaning of our querying system, comparing it with an earlier version and other querying systems.

Ontology-based stereotyping in a travel support system

The aim of this paper is to address the problem of user profile initialization in a travel support system. In the system under consideration, ontologically demarcated data is stored in a central repository, while user profiles are functionalized as instances of travel object ontologies. Creation of an initial user profile is achieved through stereotyping. An example of utilization of this technique, in the case of restaurant stereotypes, is presented.

Artemis message exchange framework

One of the most challenging problems in the healthcare domain is providing interoperability among healthcare information systems. In order to address this problem, we propose the semantic mediation of exchanged messages. Given that most of the messages exchanged in the healthcare domain are in EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) or XML format, we describe how to transform these messages into OWL (Web Ontology Language) ontology instances. The OWL message instances are then mediated through an ontology mapping tool that we developed, namely, OWLmt. OWLmt uses OWL-QL engine which enables the mapping tool to reason over the source ontology instances while generating the target ontology instances according to the mapping patterns defined through a GUI.Through a prototype implementation, we demonstrate how to mediate between HL7 Version 2 and HL7 Version 3 messages. However, the framework proposed is generic enough to mediate between any incompatible healthcare standards that are currently in use.

Multidimensional service-oriented ontology mapping

Ontology mapping is the process whereby semantic relations are defined between two ontologies at conceptual level, which in turn are applied at data level transforming source ontology instances into target ontology instances. This paper focuses on the formalisation, representation and automatic specification of semantic relations between two ontologies. The described approach grounds on the notion of service, which represents not only the transformation capabilities of the system, but also the expertise in the manipulation of semantic relations. The main contributions of this paper are the formalisation of the ontology mapping process and the specification of the multidimensional service-oriented architecture.