A roadmap to ontology specification languages

The interchange of ontologies across the World Wide Web (WWW) and the cooperation among heterogeneous agents placed on it is the main reason for the development of a new set of ontology specification languages, based on new web standards such as XML or RDF. These languages (SHOE, XOL, RDF, OIL, etc) aim to represent the knowledge contained in an ontology in a simple and human-readable way, as well as allow for the interchange of ontologies across the web. In this paper, we establish a common framework to compare the expressiveness and reasoning capabilities of "traditional" ontology languages (Ontolingua, OKBC, OCML, FLogic, LOOM) and "web-based" ontology languages, and conclude with the results of applying this framework to the selected languages

Supporting inheritance mechanisms in ontology representation

Abstract. Research in the ontology engineering field is becoming increasingly important, especially in the area of knowledge sharing. Many research efforts aim to reuse and integrate ontologies that have already been developed for different purposes. This gives rise to the need for suitable architectures for knowledge sharing. This paper analyses a specific aspect of knowledge sharing; that is the integration of ontologies in a way such that different inheritance mechanisms within the ontology are supported, and focuses on conflicts due to multiple inheritance. We first illustrate the problems that inheritance can cause within ontologies together with different approaches presented in the literature to deal with multiple inheritance conflicts and then propose a semi-automatic approach to deal with such conflicts