The Form of Organization for Small Business

Matching and integrating ontologies has been a desirable technique in areas such as data fusion, knowledge integration, the Semantic Web and the development of advanced services in distributed system. Unfortunately, the heterogeneities of ontologies cause big obstacles in the development of this technique. This licentiate thesis describes an approach to tackle the problem of ontology integration using description logics and production rules, both on a syntactic level and on a semantic level. Concepts in ontologies are matched and integrated to generate ontology intersections. Context is extracted and rules for handling heterogeneous ontology reasoning with contexts are developed. Ontologies are integrated by two processes. The first integration is to generate an ontology intersection from two OWL ontologies. The result is an ontology intersection, which is an independent ontology containing non-contradictory assertions based on the original ontologies. The second integration is carried out by rules that extract context, such as ontology content and ontology description data, e.g. time and ontology creator. The integration is designed for conceptual ontology integration. The information of instances isn't considered, neither in the integrating process nor in the integrating results. An ontology reasoner is used in the integration process for non-violation check of two OWL ontologies and a rule engine for handling conflicts according to production rules. The ontology reasoner checks the satisfiability of concepts with the help of anchors, i.e. synonyms and string-identical entities; production rules are applied to integrate ontologies, with the constraint that the original ontologies should not be violated. The second integration process is carried out with production rules with context data of the ontologies. Ontology reasoning, in a repository, is conducted within the boundary of each ontology. Nonetheless, with context rules, reasoning is carried out across ontologies. The contents of an ontology provide context for its defined entities and are extracted to provide context with the help of an ontology reasoner. Metadata of ontologies are criteria that are useful for describing ontologies. Rules using context, also called context rules, are developed and in-built in the repository. New rules can also be added. The scientific contribution of the thesis is the suggested approach applying semantic based techniques to provide a complementary method for ontology matching and integrating semantically. With the illustration of the ontology integration process and the context rules and a few manually integrated ontology results, the approach shows the potential to help to develop advanced knowledge-based services.QC 20130201</p

Reasoning with Forest Logic Programs and f-hybrid Knowledge Bases

Open Answer Set Programming (OASP) is an undecidable framework for integrating ontologies and rules. Although several decidable fragments of OASP have been identified, few reasoning procedures exist. In this article, we provide a sound, complete, and terminating algorithm for satisfiability checking w.r.t. Forest Logic Programs (FoLPs), a fragment of OASP where rules have a tree shape and allow for inequality atoms and constants. The algorithm establishes a decidability result for FoLPs. Although believed to be decidable, so far only the decidability for two small subsets of FoLPs, local FoLPs and acyclic FoLPs, has been shown. We further introduce f-hybrid knowledge bases, a hybrid framework where \SHOQ{} knowledge bases and forest logic programs co-exist, and we show that reasoning with such knowledge bases can be reduced to reasoning with forest logic programs only. We note that f-hybrid knowledge bases do not require the usual (weakly) DL-safety of the rule component, providing thus a genuine alternative approach to current integration approaches of ontologies and rules

Improving OWL RL reasoning in N3 by using specialized rules

Semantic Web reasoning can be a complex task: depending on the amount of data and the ontologies involved, traditional OWL DL reasoners can be too slow to face problems in real time. An alternative is to use a rule-based reasoner together with the OWL RL/RDF rules as stated in the specification of the OWL 2 language profiles. In most cases this approach actually improves reasoning times, but due to the complexity of the rules, not as much as it could. In this paper we present an improved strategy: based on the TBoxes of the ontologies involved in a reasoning task, we create more specific rules which then can be used for further reasoning. We make use of the EYE reasoner and its logic Notation3. In this logic, rules can be employed to derive new rules which makes the rule creation a reasoning step on its own. We evaluate our implementation on a semantic nurse call system. Our results show that adding a pre-reasoning step to produce specialized rules improves reasoning times by around 75 %

Reasoning with concept diagrams about antipatterns

Ontologies are notoriously hard to define, express and reason about. Many tools have been developed to ease the debugging and the reasoning process with ontologies, however they often lack accessibility and formalisation. A visual representation language, concept diagrams, was developed for expressing and reasoning about ontologies in an accessible way. Indeed, empirical studies show that concept diagrams are cognitively more accessible to users in ontology debugging tasks. In this paper we answer the question of “ How can concept diagrams be used to reason about inconsistencies and incoherence of ontologies?”. We do so by formalising a set of inference rules for concept diagrams that enables stepwise verification of the inconsistency and/or incoherence of a set of ontology axioms. The design of inference rules is driven by empirical evidence that concise (merged) diagrams are easier to comprehend for users than a set of lower level diagrams that offer a one-to-one translation of OWL ontology axioms into concept diagrams. We prove that our inference rules are sound, and exemplify how they can be used to reason about inconsistencies and incoherence. Finally, we indicate how our rules can serve as a foundation for new rules required when representing ontologies in diverse new domains

An Argumentation-Based Legal Reasoning Approach for DL-Ontology

Ontology is a popular method for knowledge representation in different domains, including the legal domain, and description logics (DL) is commonly used as its description language. To handle reasoning based on inconsistent DL-based legal ontologies, the current paper presents a structured argumentation framework particularly for reasoning in legal contexts on the basis of ASPIC+, and translates the legal ontology into formulas and rules of an argumentation theory. With a particular focus on the design of autonomous vehicles from the perspective of legal AI, we show that using this combined theory of formal argumentation and DL-based legal ontology, acceptable assertions can be obtained based on inconsistent ontologies, and the traditional reasoning tasks of DL ontologies can also be accomplished. In addition, a formal definition of explanations for the result of reasoning is presented.Comment: 16 pages, 1 figur

A PROPOSITION OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT METHODOLOGY FOR THE PURPOSE OF REASONING WITH THE USE OF AN UPPER-ONTOLOGY

This article describes a proposition of knowledge organization for the purpose of reasoningusing an upper-ontology. It presents a model of integrated ontologies architecture whichconsists of a domain ontologies layer with instances, a shared upper-ontology layer withadditional rules and a layer of ontologies mapping concrete domain ontologies with the upperontology.Thanks to the upper-ontology, new facts were concluded from domain ontologiesduring the reasoning process. A practical realization proposition is given as well. It is basedon some popular SemanticWeb technologies and tools, such as OWL, SWRL, nRQL, Prot´eg´eand Racer

Integration of rules and ontologies with defeasible logic programming

The Semantic Web is a vision of the current Web where resources have exact meaning assigned in terms of ontologies, thus enabling agents to reason about them. As inconsistencies cannot be treated by standard reasoning approaches, we use Defeasible Logic Programming (DeLP) to reason with possibly inconsistent ontologies. In this article we show how to integrate rules and ontologies in the Semantic Web. We show how to use a possibly inconsistent set of rules represented by a DeLP program to reason on top of a set of (possibly inconsistent) ontologies.Presentado en el X Workshop Agentes y Sistemas InteligentesRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Efficient paraconsistent reasoning with rules and ontologies for the semantic web

Ontologies formalized by means of Description Logics (DLs) and rules in the form of Logic Programs (LPs) are two prominent formalisms in the field of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning. While DLs adhere to the OpenWorld Assumption and are suited for taxonomic reasoning, LPs implement reasoning under the Closed World Assumption, so that default knowledge can be expressed. However, for many applications it is useful to have a means that allows reasoning over an open domain and expressing rules with exceptions at the same time. Hybrid MKNF knowledge bases make such a means available by formalizing DLs and LPs in a common logic, the Logic of Minimal Knowledge and Negation as Failure (MKNF). Since rules and ontologies are used in open environments such as the Semantic Web, inconsistencies cannot always be avoided. This poses a problem due to the Principle of Explosion, which holds in classical logics. Paraconsistent Logics offer a solution to this issue by assigning meaningful models even to contradictory sets of formulas. Consequently, paraconsistent semantics for DLs and LPs have been investigated intensively. Our goal is to apply the paraconsistent approach to the combination of DLs and LPs in hybrid MKNF knowledge bases. In this thesis, a new six-valued semantics for hybrid MKNF knowledge bases is introduced, extending the three-valued approach by Knorr et al., which is based on the wellfounded semantics for logic programs. Additionally, a procedural way of computing paraconsistent well-founded models for hybrid MKNF knowledge bases by means of an alternating fixpoint construction is presented and it is proven that the algorithm is sound and complete w.r.t. the model-theoretic characterization of the semantics. Moreover, it is shown that the new semantics is faithful w.r.t. well-studied paraconsistent semantics for DLs and LPs, respectively, and maintains the efficiency of the approach it extends

Integrating Ontologies and Relational Data

In recent years, an increasing number of scientific and other domains have attempted to standardize their terminology and provide reasoning capabilities through ontologies, in order to facilitate data exchange. This has spurred research into Web-based languages, formalisms, and especially query systems based on ontologies. Yet we argue that DBMS techniques can be extended to provide many of the same capabilities, with benefits in scalability and performance. We present OWLDB, a lightweight and extensible approach for the integration of relational databases and description logic based ontologies. One of the key differences between relational databases and ontologies is the high degree of implicit information contained in ontologies. OWLDB integrates the two schemes by codifying ontologies\u27 implicit information using a set of sound and complete inference rules for SHOIN (the description logic behind OWL ontologies. These inference rules can be translated into queries on a relational DBMS instance, and the query results (representing inferences) can be added back to this database. Subsequently, database applications can make direct use of this inferred, previously implicit knowledge, e.g., in the annotation of biomedical databases. As our experimental comparison to a native description logic reasoner and a triple store shows, OWLDB provides significantly greater scalability and query capabilities, without sacrifcing performance with respect to inference