On the Foundations of Data Interoperability and Semantic Search on the Web

This dissertation studies the problem of facilitating semantic search across disparate ontologies that are developed by different organizations. There is tremendous potential in enabling users to search independent ontologies and discover knowledge in a serendipitous fashion, i.e., often completely unintended by the developers of the ontologies. The main difficulty with such search is that users generally do not have any control over the naming conventions and content of the ontologies. Thus terms must be appropriately mapped across ontologies based on their meaning. The meaning-based search of data is referred to as semantic search, and its facilitation (aka semantic interoperability) then requires mapping between ontologies. In relational databases, searching across organizational boundaries currently involves the difficult task of setting up a rigid information integration system. Linked Data representations more flexibly tackle the problem of searching across organizational boundaries on the Web. However, there exists no consensus on how ontology mapping should be performed for this scenario, and the problem is open. We lay out the foundations of semantic search on the Web of Data by comparing it to keyword search in the relational model and by providing effective mechanisms to facilitate data interoperability across organizational boundaries. We identify two sharply distinct goals for ontology mapping based on real-world use cases. These goals are: (i) ontology development, and (ii) facilitating interoperability. We systematically analyze these goals, side-by-side, and contrast them. Our analysis demonstrates the implications of the goals on how to perform ontology mapping and how to represent the mappings. We rigorously compare facilitating interoperability between ontologies to information integration in databases. Based on the comparison, class matching is emphasized as a critical part of facilitating interoperability. For class matching, various class similarity metrics are formalized and an algorithm that utilizes these metrics is designed. We also experimentally evaluate the effectiveness of the class similarity metrics on real-world ontologies. In order to encode the correspondences between ontologies for interoperability, we develop a novel W3C-compliant representation, named skeleton

Semantic Search in Linked Data: Opportunities and Challenges

In this abstract, we compare semantic search (in the RDF model) with keyword search (in the relational model), and illustrate how these two search paradigms are different. This comparison addresses the following questions: (1) What can semantic search achieve that keyword search can not (in terms of behavior)? (2) Why is it difficult to simulate semantic search, using keyword search on the relational data model? We use the term keyword search, when the search is performed on data stored in the relational data model, as in traditional relational databases, and an example of keyword search in databases is [Hri02]. We use the term semantic search, when the search is performed on data stored in the RDF data model. Note that when the data is modeled in RDF, it inherently contains explicit typed relations or semantics, and hence the use of the term “semantic search.” Let us begin with an example, to illustrate the differences between semantic search and keyword search

SensoClean: Handling Noisy and Incomplete Data in Sensor Networks using Modeling

Abstract: Sensor networks have shown tremendous growth in man

Software Configuration Management Using Ontologies

Abstract. Configuration management is an important problem in large software systems. When dealing with hundreds of components, keeping track of version changes and various dependency constraints imposed on the system, throughout its development life cycle is very challenging. Current approaches are ad hoc and proprietary, and there exists no standard for specifying valid software configurations. We propose a novel formalization for configuration management, based on the approaches developed in classic knowledge representation domain. Component constraints and version restrictions are encoded in an ontology using the standard OWL-DL language (a W3C recommendation), which facilitates the sharing of knowledge about configurations, across various systems. Detection and pinpointing of component inconsistencies, by human, is a painstaking and time consuming process. The machine readability of the OWL language enables us to apply reasoning on the specification, and automatically deduce the validity of test configurations. In addition, justifications on the validity of a configuration are provided