19,114 research outputs found
Institutionalising Ontology-Based Semantic Integration
We address what is still a scarcity of general mathematical foundations for ontology-based semantic integration underlying current knowledge engineering methodologies in decentralised and distributed environments. After recalling the first-order ontology-based approach to semantic integration and a formalisation of ontological commitment, we propose a general theory that uses a syntax-and interpretation-independent formulation of language, ontology, and ontological commitment in terms of institutions. We claim that our formalisation generalises the intuitive notion of ontology-based semantic integration while retaining its basic insight, and we apply it for eliciting and hence comparing various increasingly complex notions of semantic integration and ontological commitment based on differing understandings of semantics
On the similarity relation within fuzzy ontology components
Ontology reuse is an important research issue. Ontology
merging, integration, mapping, alignment and versioning
are some of its subprocesses. A considerable research work has
been conducted on them. One common issue to these subprocesses
is the problem of defining similarity relations among ontologies
components. Crisp ontologies become less suitable in all domains
in which the concepts to be represented have vague, uncertain
and imprecise definitions. Fuzzy ontologies are developed to
cope with these aspects. They are equally concerned with the
problem of ontology reuse. Defining similarity relations within
fuzzy context may be realized basing on the linguistic similarity
among ontologies components or may be deduced from their
intentional definitions. The latter approach needs to be dealt
with differently in crisp and fuzzy ontologies. This is the scope
of this paper.ou
A Survey of Volunteered Open Geo-Knowledge Bases in the Semantic Web
Over the past decade, rapid advances in web technologies, coupled with
innovative models of spatial data collection and consumption, have generated a
robust growth in geo-referenced information, resulting in spatial information
overload. Increasing 'geographic intelligence' in traditional text-based
information retrieval has become a prominent approach to respond to this issue
and to fulfill users' spatial information needs. Numerous efforts in the
Semantic Geospatial Web, Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), and the
Linking Open Data initiative have converged in a constellation of open
knowledge bases, freely available online. In this article, we survey these open
knowledge bases, focusing on their geospatial dimension. Particular attention
is devoted to the crucial issue of the quality of geo-knowledge bases, as well
as of crowdsourced data. A new knowledge base, the OpenStreetMap Semantic
Network, is outlined as our contribution to this area. Research directions in
information integration and Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR) are then
reviewed, with a critical discussion of their current limitations and future
prospects
Ontology mapping: the state of the art
Ontology mapping is seen as a solution provider in today's landscape of ontology research. As the number of ontologies that are made publicly available and accessible on the Web increases steadily, so does the need for applications to use them. A single ontology is no longer enough to support the tasks envisaged by a distributed environment like the Semantic Web. Multiple ontologies need to be accessed from several applications. Mapping could provide a common layer from which several ontologies could be accessed and hence could exchange information in semantically sound manners. Developing such mapping has beeb the focus of a variety of works originating from diverse communities over a number of years. In this article we comprehensively review and present these works. We also provide insights on the pragmatics of ontology mapping and elaborate on a theoretical approach for defining ontology mapping
Ontology Merging as Social Choice
The problem of merging several ontologies has important applications in the Semantic Web, medical ontology engineering
and other domains where information from several distinct sources needs to be integrated in a coherent manner.We propose
to view ontology merging as a problem of social choice, i.e. as a problem of aggregating the input of a set of individuals
into an adequate collective decision. That is, we propose to view ontology merging as ontology aggregation. As a first step in
this direction, we formulate several desirable properties for ontology aggregators, we identify the incompatibility of some of
these properties, and we define and analyse several simple aggregation procedures. Our approach is closely related to work
in judgment aggregation, but with the crucial difference that we adopt an open world assumption, by distinguishing between
facts not included in an agent’s ontology and facts explicitly negated in an agent’s ontology
A semantic-based system for querying personal digital libraries
This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-28640-0_4. Copyright @ Springer 2004.The decreasing cost and the increasing availability of new technologies is enabling people to create their own digital libraries. One of the main topic in personal digital libraries is allowing people to select interesting information among all the different digital formats available today (pdf, html, tiff, etc.). Moreover the increasing availability of these on-line libraries, as well as the advent of the so called Semantic Web [1], is raising the demand for converting paper documents into digital, possibly semantically annotated, documents. These motivations drove us to design a new system which could enable the user to interact and query documents independently from the digital formats in which they are represented. In order to achieve this independence from the format we consider all the digital documents contained in a digital library as images. Our system tries to automatically detect the layout of the digital documents and recognize the geometric regions of interest. All the extracted information is then encoded with respect to a reference ontology, so that the user can query his digital library by typing free text or browsing the ontology
Intelligent multimedia indexing and retrieval through multi-source information extraction and merging
This paper reports work on automated meta-data\ud
creation for multimedia content. The approach results\ud
in the generation of a conceptual index of\ud
the content which may then be searched via semantic\ud
categories instead of keywords. The novelty\ud
of the work is to exploit multiple sources of\ud
information relating to video content (in this case\ud
the rich range of sources covering important sports\ud
events). News, commentaries and web reports covering\ud
international football games in multiple languages\ud
and multiple modalities is analysed and the\ud
resultant data merged. This merging process leads\ud
to increased accuracy relative to individual sources
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