On Repairing Reasoning Reversals via Representational Refinements

Representation is a fluent. A mismatch between the real world and an agent’s representation of it can be signalled by unexpected failures (or successes) of the agent’s reasoning. The ‘real world ’ may include the ontologies of other agents. Such mismatches can be repaired by refining or abstracting an agent’s ontology. These refinements or abstractions may not be limited to changes of belief, but may also change the signature of the agent’s ontology. We describe the implementation and successful evaluation of these ideas in the ORS system. ORS diagnoses failures in plan execution and then repairs the faulty ontologies. Our automated approach to dynamic ontology repair has been designed specifically to address real issues in multi-agent systems, for instance, as envisaged in the Semantic Web

Ontology as Product-Service System: Lessons Learned from GO, BFO and DOLCE

This paper defends a view of the Gene Ontology (GO) and of Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) as examples of what the manufacturing industry calls product-service systems. This means that they are products (the ontologies) bundled with a range of ontology services such as updates, training, help desk, and permanent identifiers. The paper argues that GO and BFO are contrasted in this respect with DOLCE, which approximates more closely to a scientific theory or a scientific publication. The paper provides a detailed overview of ontology services and concludes with a discussion of some implications of the product-service system approach for the understanding of the nature of applied ontology. Ontology developer communities are compared in this respect with developers of scientific theories and of standards (such as W3C). For each of these we can ask: what kinds of products do they develop and what kinds of services do they provide for the users of these products

A Formal Dialogue Model for Ontology Authoring

Several research teams have proposed controlled fragments of English suitable for building ontologies for the Semantic Web. These Controlled Languages are typically employed in applications that allow users to compose texts through guided authoring; the sentences in the text are parsed and interpreted to obtain axioms in OWL. We investigate here a variant of this approach in which the user enters sentences one at a time through an instant messaging interface, and receives an immediate response in English from the authoring system before typing in the next sentence. Such an application can support a variety of dialogue moves by the user—not only assertions, but also retractions, questions, requests for explanation, and so forth—and for each, we need to define an appropriate set of responses for the authoring system. To illustrate the interest and complexity of this task, we develop a formal model for just one case: responses to an assertion

Ontology-based patterns for the integration of business processes and enterprise application architectures

Increasingly, enterprises are using Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) as an approach to Enterprise Application Integration (EAI). SOA has the potential to bridge the gap between business and technology and to improve the reuse of existing applications and the interoperability with new ones. In addition to service architecture descriptions, architecture abstractions like patterns and styles capture design knowledge and allow the reuse of successfully applied designs, thus improving the quality of software. Knowledge gained from integration projects can be captured to build a repository of semantically enriched, experience-based solutions. Business patterns identify the interaction and structure between users, business processes, and data. Specific integration and composition patterns at a more technical level address enterprise application integration and capture reliable architecture solutions. We use an ontology-based approach to capture architecture and process patterns. Ontology techniques for pattern definition, extension and composition are developed and their applicability in business process-driven application integration is demonstrated

Temporalising OWL 2 QL

We design a temporal description logic, TQL, that extends the standard ontology language OWL2QL, provides basic means for temporal conceptual modelling and ensures first-order rewritability of conjunctive queries for suitably defined data instances with validity time

WSMO-lite annotations for web services

and other research output

Ontology (Science)

Increasingly, in data-intensive areas of the life sciences, experimental results are being described in algorithmically useful ways with the help of ontologies. Such ontologies are authored and maintained by scientists to support the retrieval, integration and analysis of their data. The proposition to be defended here is that ontologies of this type – the Gene Ontology (GO) being the most conspicuous example – are a _part of science_. Initial evidence for the truth of this proposition (which some will find self-evident) is the increasing recognition of the importance of empirically-based methods of evaluation to the ontology develop¬ment work being undertaken in support of scientific research. Ontologies created by scientists must, of course, be associated with implementations satisfying the requirements of software engineering. But the ontologies are not themselves engineering artifacts, and to conceive them as such brings grievous consequences. Rather, ontologies such as the GO are in different respects comparable to scientific theories, to scientific databases, and to scientific journal publications. Such a view implies a new conception of what is involved in the author¬ing, maintenance and application of ontologies in scientific contexts, and therewith also a new approach to the evaluation of ontologies and to the training of ontologists

Temporal description logic for ontology-based data access

Our aim is to investigate ontology-based data access over temporal data with validity time and ontologies capable of temporal conceptual modelling. To this end, we design a temporal description logic, TQL, that extends the standard ontology language OWL2QL, provides basic means for temporal conceptual modelling and ensures first-order rewritability of conjunctive queries for suitably defined data instances with validity time