Towards OWL-based Knowledge Representation in Petrology

This paper presents our work on development of OWL-driven systems for formal representation and reasoning about terminological knowledge and facts in petrology. The long-term aim of our project is to provide solid foundations for a large-scale integration of various kinds of knowledge, including basic terms, rock classification algorithms, findings and reports. We describe three steps we have taken towards that goal here. First, we develop a semi-automated procedure for transforming a database of igneous rock samples to texts in a controlled natural language (CNL), and then a collection of OWL ontologies. Second, we create an OWL ontology of important petrology terms currently described in natural language thesauri. We describe a prototype of a tool for collecting definitions from domain experts. Third, we present an approach to formalization of current industrial standards for classification of rock samples, which requires linear equations in OWL 2. In conclusion, we discuss a range of opportunities arising from the use of semantic technologies in petrology and outline the future work in this area.Comment: 10 pages. The paper has been accepted by OWLED2011 as a long presentatio

Knowledge Representation with Ontologies: The Present and Future

Recently, we have seen an explosion of interest in ontologies as artifacts to represent human knowledge and as critical components in knowledge management, the semantic Web, business-to-business applications, and several other application areas. Various research communities commonly assume that ontologies are the appropriate modeling structure for representing knowledge. However, little discussion has occurred regarding the actual range of knowledge an ontology can successfully represent

Ontologies on the semantic web

As an informational technology, the World Wide Web has enjoyed spectacular success. In just ten years it has transformed the way information is produced, stored, and shared in arenas as diverse as shopping, family photo albums, and high-level academic research. The “Semantic Web” was touted by its developers as equally revolutionary but has not yet achieved anything like the Web’s exponential uptake. This 17 000 word survey article explores why this might be so, from a perspective that bridges both philosophy and IT

Drawing OWL 2 ontologies with Eddy the editor

In this paper we introduce Eddy, a new open-source tool for the graphical editing of OWL~2 ontologies. Eddy is specifically designed for creating ontologies in Graphol, a completely visual ontology language that is equivalent to OWL~2. Thus, in Eddy ontologies are easily drawn as diagrams, rather than written as sets of formulas, as commonly happens in popular ontology design and engineering environments. This makes Eddy particularly suited for usage by people who are more familiar with diagramatic languages for conceptual modeling rather than with typical ontology formalisms, as is often required in non-academic and industrial contexts. Eddy provides intuitive functionalities for specifying Graphol diagrams, guarantees their syntactic correctness, and allows for exporting them in standard OWL 2 syntax. A user evaluation study we conducted shows that Eddy is perceived as an easy and intuitive tool for ontology specification

Expressing OWL axioms by English sentences: dubious in theory, feasible in practice

With OWL (Web Ontology Language) established as a standard for encoding ontologies on the Semantic Web, interest has begun to focus on the task of verbalising OWL code in controlled English (or other natural language). Current approaches to this task assume that axioms in OWL can be mapped to sentences in English. We examine three potential problems with this approach (concerning logical sophistication, information structure, and size), and show that although these could in theory lead to insuperable difficulties, in practice they seldom arise, because ontology developers use OWL in ways that favour a transparent mapping. This result is evidenced by an analysis of patterns from a corpus of over 600,000 axioms in about 200 ontologies

Developing an ontology of mathematical logic

An ontology provides a mechanism to formally represent a body of knowledge. Ontologies are one of the key technologies supporting the Semantic Web and the desire to add meaning to the information available on the World Wide Web. They provide the mechanism to describe a set of concepts, their properties and their relations to give a shared representation of knowledge. The MALog project are developing an ontology to support the development of high-quality learning materials in the general area of mathematical logic. This ontology of mathematical logic will form the basis of the semantic architecture allowing us to relate different learning objects and recommend appropriate learning paths. This paper reviews the technologies used to construct the ontology, the use of the ontology to support learning object development and explores the potential future use of the ontology