Advanced Knowledge Technologies at the Midterm: Tools and Methods for the Semantic Web

The University of Edinburgh and research sponsors are authorised to reproduce and distribute reprints and on-line copies for their purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation hereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are the author’s and shouldn’t be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of other parties.In a celebrated essay on the new electronic media, Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1962:Our private senses are not closed systems but are endlessly translated into each other in that experience which we call consciousness. Our extended senses, tools, technologies, through the ages, have been closed systems incapable of interplay or collective awareness. Now, in the electric age, the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history. Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious. Our technologies, like our private senses, now demand an interplay and ratio that makes rational co-existence possible. As long as our technologies were as slow as the wheel or the alphabet or money, the fact that they were separate, closed systems was socially and psychically supportable. This is not true now when sight and sound and movement are simultaneous and global in extent. (McLuhan 1962, p.5, emphasis in original)Over forty years later, the seamless interplay that McLuhan demanded between our technologies is still barely visible. McLuhan’s predictions of the spread, and increased importance, of electronic media have of course been borne out, and the worlds of business, science and knowledge storage and transfer have been revolutionised. Yet the integration of electronic systems as open systems remains in its infancy.Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) aims to address this problem, to create a view of knowledge and its management across its lifecycle, to research and create the services and technologies that such unification will require. Half way through its sixyear span, the results are beginning to come through, and this paper will explore some of the services, technologies and methodologies that have been developed. We hope to give a sense in this paper of the potential for the next three years, to discuss the insights and lessons learnt in the first phase of the project, to articulate the challenges and issues that remain.The WWW provided the original context that made the AKT approach to knowledge management (KM) possible. AKT was initially proposed in 1999, it brought together an interdisciplinary consortium with the technological breadth and complementarity to create the conditions for a unified approach to knowledge across its lifecycle. The combination of this expertise, and the time and space afforded the consortium by the IRC structure, suggested the opportunity for a concerted effort to develop an approach to advanced knowledge technologies, based on the WWW as a basic infrastructure.The technological context of AKT altered for the better in the short period between the development of the proposal and the beginning of the project itself with the development of the semantic web (SW), which foresaw much more intelligent manipulation and querying of knowledge. The opportunities that the SW provided for e.g., more intelligent retrieval, put AKT in the centre of information technology innovation and knowledge management services; the AKT skill set would clearly be central for the exploitation of those opportunities.The SW, as an extension of the WWW, provides an interesting set of constraints to the knowledge management services AKT tries to provide. As a medium for the semantically-informed coordination of information, it has suggested a number of ways in which the objectives of AKT can be achieved, most obviously through the provision of knowledge management services delivered over the web as opposed to the creation and provision of technologies to manage knowledge.AKT is working on the assumption that many web services will be developed and provided for users. The KM problem in the near future will be one of deciding which services are needed and of coordinating them. Many of these services will be largely or entirely legacies of the WWW, and so the capabilities of the services will vary. As well as providing useful KM services in their own right, AKT will be aiming to exploit this opportunity, by reasoning over services, brokering between them, and providing essential meta-services for SW knowledge service management.Ontologies will be a crucial tool for the SW. The AKT consortium brings a lot of expertise on ontologies together, and ontologies were always going to be a key part of the strategy. All kinds of knowledge sharing and transfer activities will be mediated by ontologies, and ontology management will be an important enabling task. Different applications will need to cope with inconsistent ontologies, or with the problems that will follow the automatic creation of ontologies (e.g. merging of pre-existing ontologies to create a third). Ontology mapping, and the elimination of conflicts of reference, will be important tasks. All of these issues are discussed along with our proposed technologies.Similarly, specifications of tasks will be used for the deployment of knowledge services over the SW, but in general it cannot be expected that in the medium term there will be standards for task (or service) specifications. The brokering metaservices that are envisaged will have to deal with this heterogeneity.The emerging picture of the SW is one of great opportunity but it will not be a wellordered, certain or consistent environment. It will comprise many repositories of legacy data, outdated and inconsistent stores, and requirements for common understandings across divergent formalisms. There is clearly a role for standards to play to bring much of this context together; AKT is playing a significant role in these efforts. But standards take time to emerge, they take political power to enforce, and they have been known to stifle innovation (in the short term). AKT is keen to understand the balance between principled inference and statistical processing of web content. Logical inference on the Web is tough. Complex queries using traditional AI inference methods bring most distributed computer systems to their knees. Do we set up semantically well-behaved areas of the Web? Is any part of the Web in which semantic hygiene prevails interesting enough to reason in? These and many other questions need to be addressed if we are to provide effective knowledge technologies for our content on the web

Semantic Web Techniques to Support Interoperability in Distributed Networked Environments

We explore two Semantic Web techniques arising from ITA research into semantic alignment and interoperability in distributed networks. The first is POAF (Portable Ontology Aligned Fragments) which addresses issues relating to the portability and usage of ontology alignments. POAF uses an ontology fragmentation strategy to achieve portability, and enables subsequent usage through a form of automated ontology modularization. The second technique, SWEDER (Semantic Wrapping of Existing Data sources with Embedded Rules), is grounded in the creation of lightweight ontologies to semantically wrap existing data sources, to facilitate rapid semantic integration through representational homogeneity. The semantic integration is achieved through the creation of context ontologies which define the integrations and provide a portable definition of the integration rules in the form of embedded SPARQL construct clauses. These two Semantic Web techniques address important practical issues relevant to the potential future adoption of ontologies in distributed network environments

A Survey of Top-Level Ontologies - to inform the ontological choices for a Foundation Data Model

The Centre for Digital Built Britain has been tasked through the Digital Framework Task Group to develop an Information Management Framework (IMF) to support the development of a National Digital Twin (NDT) as set out in “The Pathway to an Information Management Framework” (Hetherington, 2020). A key component of the IMF is a Foundation Data Model (FDM), built upon a top-level ontology (TLO), as a basis for ensuring consistent data across the NDT. This document captures the results collected from a broad survey of top-level ontologies, conducted by the IMF technical team. It focuses on the core ontological choices made in their foundations and the pragmatic engineering consequences these have on how the ontologies can be applied and further scaled. This document will provide the basis for discussions on a suitable TLO for the FDM. It is also expected that these top-level ontologies will provide a resource whose components can be harvested and adapted for inclusion in the FDM

Harmonizing Software Standards with a Semantic Model

The application of standards in the software development process supports interoperability between systems. Maintenance of standards must be guaranteed on the organisational and technical level. The use of semantic technologies can contribute to the standard maintenance process by providing a harmonizing bridge between standards of different knowledge domains and languages and by providing a single point of administration for standard domain concepts. This paper describes a case study of the creation of a semantic layer between software standards for water management systems in The Netherland

A formal verification framework and associated tools for enterprise modeling : application to UEML

The aim of this paper is to propose and apply a verification and validation approach to Enterprise Modeling that enables the user to improve the relevance and correctness, the suitability and coherence of a model by using properties specification and formal proof of properties

A Large Scale Dataset for the Evaluation of Ontology Matching Systems

Recently, the number of ontology matching techniques and systems has increased significantly. This makes the issue of their evaluation and comparison more severe. One of the challenges of the ontology matching evaluation is in building large scale evaluation datasets. In fact, the number of possible correspondences between two ontologies grows quadratically with respect to the numbers of entities in these ontologies. This often makes the manual construction of the evaluation datasets demanding to the point of being infeasible for large scale matching tasks. In this paper we present an ontology matching evaluation dataset composed of thousands of matching tasks, called TaxME2. It was built semi-automatically out of the Google, Yahoo and Looksmart web directories. We evaluated TaxME2 by exploiting the results of almost two dozen of state of the art ontology matching systems. The experiments indicate that the dataset possesses the desired key properties, namely it is error-free, incremental, discriminative, monotonic, and hard for the state of the art ontology matching systems. The paper has been accepted for publication in "The Knowledge Engineering Review", Cambridge Universty Press (ISSN: 0269-8889, EISSN: 1469-8005)