Evaluating Knowledge Representation and Reasoning Capabilites of 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 of "traditional" ontology languages (Ontolingua, OKBC, OCML, FLogic, LOOM) and "web-based" ontology languages. As a result of this study, we conclude that different needs in KR and reasoning may exist in the building of an ontology-based application, and these needs must be evaluated in order to choose the most suitable ontology language(s)

Integrating heterogeneous web service styles with flexible semantic web services groundings

Semantic web services are touted as a means to integrate web services inside and outside the enterprise, but while current semantic web service frameworks— including OWL-S [1], SA-WSDL, and WSMO 1 [2]—assume a homogeneous ecosystem of SOAP services and XML serialisations, growing numbers of real services are implemented using XML-RPC and RESTful interfaces, and non-XML serialisations like JSON. 2 Semantic services platforms based on OWL-S and WSMO use XML mapping languages to translate between an XML serialisation of the ontology data and the on-the-wire messages exchanged with the web service, a process referred to as grounding. This XML mapping approach suffers from two problems: it cannot address the growing number of non-SOAP, non-XML services being deployed on the Web, and it requires the modeller creating the semantic web service descriptions to work with the serialisation of the service ontology and a syntactic mapping language, in addition to the knowledge representation language used for representing the semantic service ontologies and descriptions. Our approach draws the service’s interface into the ontology: we defin

Metarel: an Ontology to support the inferencing of Semantic Web relations within Biomedical Ontologies

While OWL, the Web Ontology Language, is often regarded as the preferred language for Knowledge Representation in the world of the Semantic Web, the potential of direct representation in RDF, the Resource Description Framework, is underestimated. Here we show how ontologies adequately represented in RDF could be semantically enriched with SPARUL. To deal with the semantics of relations we created Metarel, a meta-ontology for relations. The utility of the approach is demonstrated by an application on Gene Ontology Annotation (GOA) RDF graphs in the RDF Knowledge Base BioGateway. We show that Metarel can facilitate inferencing in BioGateway, which allows for queries that are otherwise not possible. Metarel is available on http://www.metarel.org

Building a family ontology to meet consistency criteria

Semantic web is an extension of the current web in which the existing information on the web are organized and encoded more meaningfully using ontology language, thus enabling effective communication among machines and humans. Ontology is the backbone of the semantic web that contributes to knowledge sharing among intended parties over distributed systems around the world. In the past few years, semantic web has been widely accepted by a variety of fields for better knowledge representation, communication, sharing and reasoning on the web. Now, there are existing genealogical ontologies proposed by different groups of researchers once semantic web has emerged as third generation of the web. However, existing ontologies still lack certain important concepts and properties to support the domain of family relations. This may lead to the inability of the ontology to deliver full potential of exchanging family history information among all interested parties. Moreover, existing ontologies do not employ the full potential of SWRL rules to reason the individuals within the ontology. The main aim of this research is to build a new Family Ontology which obeys the consistency criteria. Consistency checking ensures there are no contradictory concepts found within the resulting ontology. The consistency of Family Ontology will be evaluated using FACT++, HermiT and Pellet reasoners. By augmenting the additional axioms and testing the resulting ontology thoroughly using reasoner tools, the proposed Family Ontology is expected to achieve a consistency of 100%.This research is meaningful and significant to all humans since everyone has his or her own unique family history. The proposed ontology also facilitates effective and efficient communication among all intended parties since shared vocabularies and standards are employed by the proposed ontology

Multilingual Lexical Semantic Resources for Ontology Translation

We describe the integration of some multilingual language resources in ontological descriptions, with the purpose of providing ontologies, which are normally using concept labels in just one (natural) language, with multilingual facility in their design and use in the context of Semantic Web applications, supporting both the semantic annotation of textual documents with multilingual ontology labels and ontology extraction from multilingual text sources

Representing simmodel in the web ontology language

Many building energy performance (BEP) simulation tools, such as EnergyPlus and DOE-2, use custom schema definitions (IDD and BDL respectively) as opposed to standardised schema definitions (defined in XSD, EXPRESS, and so forth). A Simulation Domain Model (SimModel) was therefore proposed earlier, representative for a new interoperable XML-based data model for the building simulation domain. Its ontology aims at moving away from tool-specific, non-standard nomenclature by implementing an industry-validated terminology aligned with the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC). In this paper, we document our ongoing efforts to make building simulation data more interoperable with other building data. In order to be able to better integrate SimModel information with other building information, we have aimed at representing this information in the Resource Description Framework (RDF). A conversion service has been built that is able to parse the SimModel ontology in the form of XSD schemas and output a SimModel ontology in OWL. In this article, we document this effort and give an indication of what the resulting SimModel ontology in OWL can be used for