Trust‐annotated ontology integration using social modelling*

Abstract: As ontologies become more prevalent for information management the need to manage the ontologies increases. Multiple organizations, within a domain, often combine to work on specific projects. When separate organizations come together to communicate, an alignment of terminology and semantics is required. Ontology creation is often privatized for these individual organizations to represent their view of the domain. This creates problems with alignment and integration, making it necessary to consider how much each ontology should influence the current decision to be made. To assist with determining influence a trust‐based approach on authors and their ontologies provides a mechanism for ranking reasoning results. A representation of authors and the individual resources they provide for the merged ontology becomes necessary. The authors are then weighted by trust and trust for the resources they provide the ontology is calculated. This is then used to assist the integration process allowing for an evolutionary trust model to calculate the level of credibility of resources. Once the integration is complete semantic agreement between ontologies allows for the revision of the authors' trust.     

An ontological approach for reliable data integration in the industrial domain

Ontologies are structural components of modern information systems. The taxonomy, the core of an ontology, is a delicate balance between adequacy considerations, minimal commitments and implementation concerns. However, ontological taxonomies can be quite restrictive and entities that are commonly used in production and services might not find room in a official or de facto standard or ontological system. This mismatch between the company's view and the ontological constraints can limit or even jeoparize the adoption of modern formal ontologies in industry. We study the roots of this problem and individuate a general set of principles to relate the ontology and those non-ontological entities that are yet important for the core business of the company. We then introduce a theoretically sound and formally robust approach to expand a given ontology with new dependency relations, which make available information regarding the non-ontological entities without affecting the consistency of the overall information system.     

语义Web中的本体匹配研究

随着本体应用的快速发展,本体数量大幅增长,这些本体描述的内容存在重复和关联,但在本体模式上却表现各异。本体匹配旨在识别异构本体中存在语义关联的实体,并建立它们之间匹配关系。它对于消除本体异构、实现本体集成和数据融合等具有重要作用。形式化定义了语义Web中的本体匹配问题,并从本体匹配方法、本体匹配挑战和本体匹配原型系统3个方面调研了最新研究进展,旨在为进一步研究指明方向。     

Detection and resolution of semantic inconsistency and redundancy in an automatic ontology merging system

In recent years, researchers have been developing algorithms for the automatic mapping and merging of ontologies to meet the demands of interoperability between heterogeneous and distributed information systems. But, still state-of-the-art ontology mapping and merging systems is semi-automatic that reduces the burden of manual creation and maintenance of mappings, and need human intervention for their validation. The contribution presented in this paper makes human intervention one step more down by automatically identifying semantic inconsistencies in the early stages of ontology merging. We are detecting semantic heterogeneities that occur due to conflicts among the set of Generalized Concept Inclusions, Property Subsumption Criteria, and Constraint Satisfaction Mechanism in local heterogeneous ontologies, which become obstacles for the generation of semantically consistent global merged ontology. We present several algorithms to detect such semantic inconsistencies based on subsumption analysis of concepts and properties in local ontologies from the list of initial mappings. We provide ontological patterns for resolving these inconsistencies automatically. This results global merged ontology free from ??circulatory error in class/property hierarchy??, ??common class between disjoint classes/properties??, ??redundancy of subclass/subproperty of relations?? and other types of ??semantic inconsistency?? errors. Experiments on the real ontologies show that our algorithms save time and cost of traversing local ontologies, improve system??s performance by producing only consistent accurate mappings, and reduce the users?? dependability for ensuring the satisfiability of merged ontology.     

本体映射方法研究

本体集成是为了解决不同本体之间的共享和交流,其中本体映射是本体集成的一个关键环节。在以往的系统中,本体映射通常是由手工实现的。目前的研究都是朝着实现本体映射的自动或半自动化方向努力。文章对目前本体映射的方法进行了分类,针对本体定义模型,提出了基于语法、基于实例、基于定义、基于层次结构的分类。针对具体映射实现技术。提出了基于规则、基于统计学、基于机器学习的分类。并对每种方法进行了详细描述。这项研究工作可以作为人们提出新的映射方法或者组合的映射方法的一个参考。     

A semantic interoperability approach to health‐care data: Resolving data‐level conflicts

The integration of data from various electronic health record (EHR) systems presents a critical conflict in the sharing and exchanging of patient information across a diverse group of health‐oriented organizations. Patient health records in each system are annotated with ontologies utilizing different health‐care standards, creating ontology conflicts both at the schema and data levels. In this study, we introduce the concept of semantic ontology mapping for the facilitation and interoperability of heterogeneous EHR systems. This approach proposes a means of detecting and resolving the data‐level conflicts that generally exist in the ontology mapping process. We have extended the semantic bridge ontology in support of ontology mapping at the data level and generated the required mapping rules to reconcile data from different ontological sources into a canonical format. As a result, linked‐patient data are generated and made available in a semantic query engine to facilitate user queries of patient data across heterogeneous EHR systems.     

A philosophy‐driven entity classification and enrichment for ontology mapping

Abstract: Ontologies are intended to facilitate semantic interoperability among distributed and intelligent information systems. Because of the distributed nature of the World Wide Web, Web ontologies have been developing in multiple forms of heterogeneity. For interoperating among information systems through heterogeneous ontologies, ontology mapping is a prerequisite process to generate alignment between two ontologies. In order to improve alignment accuracy, our approach is to clarify and enrich the semantics of ontological entities before mapping. For this purpose, we present a semi‐automatic framework of entity classification and enrichment by applying three philosophical notions: identity condition, existential rigidity, and external dependency. Our objective is to supply a set of philosophy‐driven anchors into ontologies for their mapping process by using a sortal taxonomy as a background knowledge model.     

一种基于RDF图的本体匹配方法

本体匹配是建立两个本体之间映射关系的过程,一个高效、严格的相似度计算方法是本体匹配的前提条件,为此提出了一种基于RDF图匹配的方法。该方法用RDF图表示本体,使本体间的匹配问题转化为RDF图的匹配问题,并利用匹配树表示匹配的状态,通过匹配树计算出两个本体中各实体之间的相似度,进而得到两个本体之间的映射关系。实验结果表明,该方法在查全率和查准率方面都有很好的表现。     

本体集成研究综述

本体集成(ontology integration)的目的是使异质的本体互操作,目前是本体研究的一个热点.本体集成首先发现实体间关系,生成本体映射,然后根据应用目的基于映射进行处理,最终达成本体对齐或者本体合并的目标.本文介绍了本体集成中的概念,给出本体集成的一般工程化方法.对国内外较具代表性的本体集成工具进行比较分析,讨论了现存的问题,指出了未来的研究方向.     

受限本体相似

在从不同的语义Web上得到用本体表达的文档资源以后,这些文档资源通常被转换成基于同一个本体的本体描述,这样既便于对文档的分析,又便于在此基础上进行信息抽取.这些文档本体之间仅仅在实例和关系层上彼此相互不同,在类、属性、规则、谓词方面都基本相同.对这种文档的检索,一个最普通的操作就是计算本体之间的相似性.很多计算本体相似性的方法基本上都是以分别属于不同本体的实体之间配对比较来实现,而且往往要考虑所有相关的元素.这不仅增加了计算复杂度,还会遇到循环计算的问题.在对语义网本体语言的推理能力进行研究以后,提出了一种基于知识推理的二阶本体相似技术,解决了循环计算的问题.     

Experimentation with local consensus ontologies with implications for automated service composition

Agent technologies represent a promising approach for the integration of interorganizational capabilities across distributed, networked environments. However, knowledge sharing interoperability problems can arise when agents incorporating differing ontologies try to synchronize their internal information. Moreover, in practice, agents may not have a common or global consensus ontology that will facilitate knowledge sharing and integration of functional capabilities. We propose a method to enable agents to develop a local consensus ontology during operation time as needed. By identifying similarities in the ontologies of their peer agents, a set of agents can discover new concepts/relations and integrate them into a local consensus ontology on demand. We evaluate this method, both syntactically and semantically, when forming local consensus ontologies with and without the use of a lexical database. We also report on the effects when several factors, such as the similarity measure, the relation search level depth, and the merge order, are varied. Finally, experimenting in the domain of agent-supported Web service composition, we demonstrate how our method allows us to successfully autonomously form service-oriented local consensus ontologies.     

A high-level electrical energy ontology with weighted attributes

One of the significant application areas of domain ontologies is known to be text analysis applications like information extraction and text classification systems, and semantic portals. In this paper, we present a high-level ontology for the electrical energy domain. This domain ontology has weighted attributes to cover the inherent fuzziness in the textual representations of its concepts. Additionally, we have included in the ontology the necessary attributes to align the ontology concepts to on-line collaborative knowledge bases like Wikipedia and linked open data sources like DBpedia, other attributes to facilitate its use in multilingual applications, and concepts to hold the named entities in the domain. The ultimate ontology is aligned with the previously proposed ontologies for the energy-related subdomains after extending the latter ones with weighted attributes. We make the ultimate form of the electrical energy ontology, as well as the extended versions of the domain ontologies for the subdomains, available for research purposes. Also included in the paper are sample text analysis applications which mainly exploit the weighted attributes within the ontology.     

Instance-based domain ontological view creation towards semantic integration

In many domains today there are very limited explicit ontologies established for implementing information systems. Traditional ontology-driven semantic integration approaches cannot be directly applied in integrating these information systems. Usually, the information systems have schemas, a type of formal information model, for their information repositories which to some extent imply the semantics of the information. Each schema actually reflects a specific view of the domain conceptualization. This paper investigates the theoretical foundation of ontologies and extends the traditional ontology concept to the ontological view concept. It proposes to use ontological views to address the challenge of semantic integration. The proposed approach adopts the schemas to create local ontological views, uses data instances of the information systems to discover semantic relationships between the concepts within the ontological views, and builds a domain ontological view based on the discovered equivalence mappings. It applies the hierarchical clustering technique on the data instances and, in the further analysis, uses the clusters to reduce the cost of processing a large amount of data. The matching of concept properties is based on the probability distribution of the data instances. The experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of this approach.     

基于本体的电力多数据源信息集成研究

在电力领域,由于异构的多数据源带来的语义冲突问题越来越成为制约信息集成的难点。基于本体的概念,提出一个电力信息语义集成方案。从分布式的电力数据源中提取出局部本体,然后将局部本体整合为全局本体,从而消除数据库之间的信息冗余与冲突,能够实现多维查询、信息推理和本体演化等功能,从语义层面实现电力信息的无歧义共享与重用。     

Methodology and intermediate layer for the automatic creation of ontology instances stored in relational databases

In this paper, we introduce our solution for mapping local ontologies to relational and object‐oriented representations. This solution is part of the GeoNis framework for the interoperability of geo‐information systems applications in a local community environment. The GeoNis framework is based on a hybrid ontology approach for data integration. Therefore, a very important subject in our research on semantic data integration is the creation of mapping between a spatial information source and its local ontology. We developed the OWL2RDB mapping language to create an intermediate layer between a relational database and the OWL ontology. This intermediate layer contains rules (expressed in the OWL2RDB language) for mapping between the structural elements of a relational database and the concepts of OWL ontologies. We also present a system that uses the OWL2RDB intermediate layer to create classes that can handle ontology instances stored in relational databases. We have developed a prototype for a tool that uses this proposed approach for the automatic generation of translator/wrapper components in the GeoNis interoperability environment. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Using OWL-VisMod through a decision-making process for reusing OWL ontologies

Knowledge representation (KR) can be defined as a set of ontological commitments, provided with the capabilities of performing inference. The knowledge can be represented using an ontology, which provides a shared insight into a certain domain. The use of ontologies to represent knowledge also allows interoperation among knowledge-based systems. The process of building ontologies can be tedious and sometimes exhaustive. A possible solution in order to avoid this problem would be to reuse the ontologies previously created by others. This paper describes a case study of reusability using OWL-VisMod, a tool designed for developing ontological engineering based on visual conceptual modelling for OWL ontologies. A workflow performed with OWL-VisMod is described; including a decision-making process in order to decide whether or not it could be desirable to reuse an ontology, according to the requirements of a certain project.     

一种模块化的多策略模糊本体映射方法*

通过分析模糊本体的特点,并结合模块化和多策略映射的优点,提出了一个面向语义Web的模糊本体模型,并针对该模型提出了一种模块化的多策略本体映射方法,以提高模糊本体映射的效率和准确率。最后对映射结果进行融合并采用迭代矫正的方法进行修复,使得映射结果更加准确可靠。     

一种基于Web的通用本体学习框架

提出一种通用的多策略本体学习框架,通过对Web上各专业领域文档集进行挖掘来实现本体自动构建。讨论本体学习中本体概念的抽取、概念之间语义关系的抽取和分类体系的自动构建等关键技术,通过实验对算法进行测试和评价。由于集成了多种机器学习算法,该方法在概念抽取和语义关系学习方面具有更高的准确性,采用通用本体WordNet和HowNet作为语料库,可适用于不同的专业领域。通过按需获取Web文档,该方法能实时生成本体。