一个基于语义模块的交互式本体匹配框架

本体匹配是用来解决异质本体间互操作问题的一种技术手段。目前,大多数关于本体匹配的研究都集中在了如何提高匹配结果的质量上。然而,一方面,在许多情况下,匹配结果的正确与否直接依赖于用户的判断,另一方面,由于一些描述现实世界的本体十分庞大,匹配工具往往不能及时为用户提供可供确认的匹配对。为此,提出了一种基于语义模块的交互式本体匹配框架。借助信息论的相关知识,将本体聚类成语义模块。用户利用模块核心结点信息对模块的内容进行推断,从而将大规模的本体匹配任务转换为数个规模较小的语义模块间的匹配任务。通过合理地增大用户在匹配过程中的作用,试图在保证匹配质量的同时提高匹配效率。已获得的实验结果表明该方法能显著提高本体匹配任务的效率。     

Semantic Ontology Mapping for Interoperability of Learning Resource Systems using a rule-based reasoning approach

There is an increasing demand for sharing learning resources between existing learning resource systems to support reusability, exchangeability, and adaptability. The learning resources need to be annotated with ontologies into learning objects that use different metadata standards. These ontologies have introduced the problems of semantic and structural heterogeneity. This research proposes a Semantic Ontology Mapping for Interoperability of Learning Resource Systems. To enable semantic ontology mapping, this research proposes conflict detection and resolution techniques for both semantic and structural conflicts. The Semantic Bridge Ontology has been proposed as a core component for generating mapping rules to reconcile terms defined in local ontologies into terms defined in the target common ontology. This work defines the reasoning rules to classify related learning objects to enhance the powerful deductive reasoning capabilities of the system. As a consequence, ontology-based learning object metadata are generated and used by the semantic query engine to facilitate user queries of learning objects across heterogeneous learning resource systems.     

语义集成中的不确定性本体映射模型

语义Web的高速发展使其具有动态性和异构性特征,解决语义信息的异构性问题成为实现信息集成的关键。本体作为一种语义Web的知识表示形式,增强了Web的语义信息。因此,为了解决语义异构性,实现数据间的互操作,必须建立异构本体间的映射关系。然而,为庞大的异构本体建立完全精确的本体映射是不现实的,本体映射中存在一定的不确定性。提出了一种新型的本体映射框架——语义集成中的不确定性本体映射。从不同方面研究本体特征,集合了多种映射策略,并引入了各映射策略中不确定性匹配的解决方案。实验证明,该方法具有可靠的实验性能,并且具有很好的通用性和可扩展性。     

Determining semantic similarity among entity classes from different ontologies

Semantic similarity measures play an important role in information retrieval and information integration. Traditional approaches to modeling semantic similarity compute the semantic distance between definitions within a single ontology. This single ontology is either a domain-independent ontology or the result of the integration of existing ontologies. We present an approach to computing semantic similarity that relaxes the requirement of a single ontology and accounts for differences in the levels of explicitness and formalization of the different ontology specifications. A similarity function determines similar entity classes by using a matching process over synonym sets, semantic neighborhoods, and distinguishing features that are classified into parts, functions, and attributes. Experimental results with different ontologies indicate that the model gives good results when ontologies have complete and detailed representations of entity classes. While the combination of word matching and semantic neighborhood matching is adequate for detecting equivalent entity classes, feature matching allows us to discriminate among similar, but not necessarily equivalent entity classes.     

RiMOM: A Dynamic Multistrategy Ontology Alignment Framework

Ontology alignment identifies semantically matching entities in different ontologies. Various ontology alignment strategies have been proposed; however, few systems have explored how to automatically combine multiple strategies to improve the matching effectiveness. This paper presents a dynamic multistrategy ontology alignment framework, named RiMOM. The key insight in this framework is that similarity characteristics between ontologies may vary widely. We propose a systematic approach to quantitatively estimate the similarity characteristics for each alignment task and propose a strategy selection method to automatically combine the matching strategies based on two estimated factors. In the approach, we consider both textual and structural characteristics of ontologies. With RiMOM, we participated in the 2006 and 2007 campaigns of the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI). Our system is among the top three performers in benchmark data sets.     

Ontology selection ranking model for knowledge reuse

Ontology reuse is recommended as a key factor to develop cost-effective and high-quality ontologies because it could reduce development costs by avoiding rebuilding existing ontologies. Selecting the desired ontology from existing ontologies is essential for ontology reuse. Until now, much research on ontology selection has focused on lexical-level support. However, in these cases, it is almost impossible to find an ontology that includes all the concepts matched by the search terms at the semantic level. Finding an ontology that meets users’ needs requires a new ontology selection and ranking mechanism based on semantic similarity matching. We propose an ontology selection and ranking model consisting of selection standards and metrics based on better semantic matching capabilities. The model we propose presents two novel features different from previous research models. First, it enhances the ontology selection and ranking method practically and effectively by enabling semantic matching of taxonomy or relational linkage between concepts. Second, it identifies what measures should be used to rank ontologies in the given context and what weight should be assigned to each selection measure.     

FaBiO and CiTO: Ontologies for describing bibliographic resources and citations

Semantic publishing is the use of Web and Semantic Web technologies to enhance the meaning of a published journal article, to facilitate its automated discovery, to enable its linking to semantically related articles, to provide access to data within the article in actionable form, and to facilitate integration of data between articles. Recently, semantic publishing has opened the possibility of a major step forward in the digital publishing world. For this to succeed, new semantic models and visualization tools are required to fully meet the specific needs of authors and publishers. In this article, we introduce the principles and architectures of two new ontologies central to the task of semantic publishing: FaBiO, the FRBR-aligned Bibliographic Ontology, an ontology for recording and publishing bibliographic records of scholarly endeavours on the Semantic Web, and CiTO, the Citation Typing Ontology, an ontology for the characterization of bibliographic citations both factually and rhetorically. We present those two models step by step, in order to emphasise their features and to stress their advantages relative to other pre-existing information models. Finally, we review the uptake of FaBiO and CiTO within the academic and publishing communities.     

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。     

FaBiO and CiTO: Ontologies for describing bibliographic resources and citations

Semantic publishing is the use of Web and Semantic Web technologies to enhance the meaning of a published journal article, to facilitate its automated discovery, to enable its linking to semantically related articles, to provide access to data within the article in actionable form, and to facilitate integration of data between articles. Recently, semantic publishing has opened the possibility of a major step forward in the digital publishing world. For this to succeed, new semantic models and visualization tools are required to fully meet the specific needs of authors and publishers. In this article, we introduce the principles and architectures of two new ontologies central to the task of semantic publishing: FaBiO, the FRBR-aligned Bibliographic Ontology, an ontology for recording and publishing bibliographic records of scholarly endeavours on the Semantic Web, and CiTO, the Citation Typing Ontology, an ontology for the characterization of bibliographic citations both factually and rhetorically. We present those two models step by step, in order to emphasise their features and to stress their advantages relative to other pre-existing information models. Finally, we review the uptake of FaBiO and CiTO within the academic and publishing communities.     

Ontology Integration: Approaches and Challenging Issues

In recent years, the decentralized development of ontologies has led to the generation of multiple ontologies of overlapping knowledge. This heterogeneity problem can be tackled by integrating existing ontologies to build a single coherent one. Ontology integration has been investigated during the last two decades, but it is still a challenging task. In this article, we provide a comprehensive survey of all ontology integration aspects. We discuss related notions and scrutinize existing techniques and literature approaches. We also detail the role of ontology matching in the ontology integration process. Indeed, the ontology community has adopted the splitting of the ontology integration problem into matching, merging and repairing sub-tasks, where matching is a necessary preceding step for merging, and repairing can be included in the matching process or performed separately. Ontology matching and merging systems have become quite proficient, however the trickiest part lies in the repairing step. We also focus on the case of a holistic integration of multiple heterogeneous ontologies, which needs further exploration. Finally, we investigate challenges, open issues, and future directions of the ontology integration and matching areas.     

SPHeRe

The abundance of semantically related information has resulted in semantic heterogeneity. Ontology matching is among the utilized techniques implemented for semantic heterogeneity resolution; however, ontology matching being a computationally intensive problem can be a time-consuming process. Medium to large-scale ontologies can take from hours up to days of computation time depending upon the utilization of computational resources and complexity of matching algorithms. This delay in producing results, makes ontology matching unsuitable for semantic web-based interactive and semireal-time systems. This paper presents SPHeRe, a performance-based initiative that improves ontology matching performance by exploiting parallelism over multicore cloud platform. Parallelism has been overlooked by ontology matching systems. SPHeRe avails this opportunity and provides a solution by: (i) creating and caching serialized subsets of candidate ontologies with single-step parallel loading; (ii) lightweight matcher-based and redundancy-free subsets result in smaller memory footprints and faster load time; and (iii) implementing data parallelism based distribution over subsets of candidate ontologies by exploiting the multicore distributed hardware of cloud platform for parallel ontology matching and execution. Performance evaluation of SPHeRe on a trinode (12-core) private cloud infrastructure has shown up to 3 times faster ontology load time with up to 8 times smaller memory footprint than Web Ontology Language (OWL) frameworks Jena and OWLAPI. Furthermore, by utilizing the computation resources most efficiently, SPHeRe provides the best scalability in contrast with other ontology matching systems, i.e., GOMMA, LogMap, AROMA, and AgrMaker. On a private cloud instance with 8 cores, SPHeRe outperforms the most performance efficient ontology matching system GOMMA by 40 % in scalability and 4 times in performance.     

Learning to match ontologies on the Semantic Web

On the Semantic Web, data will inevitably come from many different ontologies, and information processing across ontologies is not possible without knowing the semantic mappings between them. Manually finding such mappings is tedious, error-prone, and clearly not possible on the Web scale. Hence the development of tools to assist in the ontology mapping process is crucial to the success of the Semantic Web. We describe GLUE, a system that employs machine learning techniques to find such mappings. Given two ontologies, for each concept in one ontology GLUE finds the most similar concept in the other ontology. We give well-founded probabilistic definitions to several practical similarity measures and show that GLUE can work with all of them. Another key feature of GLUE is that it uses multiple learning strategies, each of which exploits well a different type of information either in the data instances or in the taxonomic structure of the ontologies. To further improve matching accuracy, we extend GLUE to incorporate commonsense knowledge and domain constraints into the matching process. Our approach is thus distinguished in that it works with a variety of well-defined similarity notions and that it efficiently incorporates multiple types of knowledge. We describe a set of experiments on several real-world domains and show that GLUE proposes highly accurate semantic mappings. Finally, we extend GLUE to find complex mappings between ontologies and describe experiments that show the promise of the approach.Received: 16 December 2002, Accepted: 16 April 2003, Published online: 17 September 2003Edited by: Edited by B.V. Atluri, A. Joshi, and Y. Yesha     

本体映射的方法在汽车领域的应用

本体映射是本体集成的一个关键环节.本体映射是实现不同本体之间共享和交流的基础,为相似或不同应用领域间的知识共享铺平道路,方便知识的获取.介绍了两个汽车领域本体之间进行映射的一种方法,该方法使用了基于语法匹配的方法并利用实例信息确定所映射的概念.最后结合了具体的例子来说明了核心算法.     

A comprehensive framework for the evaluation of ontology modularization

The Semantic Web and ontologies have received increased attention in recent years. The delivery of well-designed ontologies enhances the effect of Semantic Web services, but building ontologies from scratch requires considerable time and effort. Modularizing ontologies and integrating ontology modules to a given context help users effectively develop ontologies and revitalize ontology dissemination. Therefore, various tools for modularizing ontologies have been developed. However, selecting an appropriate tool to fit a given context is difficult because the assumptions for the approaches greatly vary. Therefore, a suitable framework is required to compare and help screen the most suitable modularization tool.In this research, we propose a new evaluation framework for selecting an appropriate ontology modularization tool. We present three aspects of tool evaluation as the main dimensions for the assessment of modularization tools: tool performance, data performance, and usability.This study provides an implicit evaluation and an empirical analysis of three modularization tools. It also provides an evaluation method for ontology modularization, enabling ontology engineers to compare different modularization tools and easily choose an appropriate one for the production of qualifying ontology modules.The experimental results indicate that the proposed evaluation criteria for ontology modularization tools are valid and effective. This research provides a useful method for assessing and selecting ontology modularization tools. Modularization performance, data performance, and usability are the three modularization aspects designed and applied to the context of ontology. We provide a new focus on the comprehensive framework to evaluate the performance and usability of ontology modularization tools. The proposed framework should be of value to both ontology engineers, who are interested in ontology modularization, and to practitioners, who need information on how to evaluate and select a specific type of ontology tool in accordance with the requirements of the individual environment.     

本体相似度研究

不同本体之间的交互成为语义Web的首要任务,其中本体相似度计算是本体映射的关健环节。在以往的研究中,本体相似度计算通常专注于模式及其结构的匹配。目前研究朝着进一步考虑本体内部语义信息方向努力。本文描述了语义相似度栈的各个层次,依据各个层次的语义特征对目前本体相似度方法进行分类,并对每种方法进行了详细描述。最后对现有一些主要的本体间相似度计算方法进行归纳总结。这项研究工作将为人们提出新的相似度方法或者组合的计算方法作一个参考。     

A statistically-based ontology matching tool

Ontologies have become a popular means of knowledge sharing and reuse. This has motivated development of large independent ontologies within the same or different domains with some overlapping information among them. In order to match such large ontologies, automatic matchers become an inevitable solution. This work explores the use of a predictive statistical model to establish an alignment between two input ontologies. We demonstrate how to integrate ontology partitioning and parallelism in the ontology matching process in order to make the statistical predictive model scalable to large ontology matching tasks. Unlike most ontology matching tools which establish 1:1 cardinality mappings, our statistical model generates one-to-many cardinality mappings.     

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。     

一种本体知识文摘方法的研究和实现

本体作为领域知识的表示方法，已经成为语义Web的基础。本体通常由领域专家建立，用于表示领域中概念以及概念与概念之间的关系。但这也使得普通用户难以理解本体中描述的信息。普通用户往往希望本体中的信息能够以自然语言的形式描述。这正是本文讨论的主要问题。本文采用分治策略，利用基于嵌套复杂模板的解决方案，设计并实现了本体知识文摘的算法。我们开发了一个原型系统SWARMS，并将该文摘算法进行了运用。初步的实验表明，本文提出的方法取得较好的结果。     

Measuring design complexity of semantic web ontologies

Ontology languages such as OWL are being widely used as the Semantic Web movement gains momentum. With the proliferation of the Semantic Web, more and more large-scale ontologies are being developed in real-world applications to represent and integrate knowledge and data. There is an increasing need for measuring the complexity of these ontologies in order for people to better understand, maintain, reuse and integrate them. In this paper, inspired by the concept of software metrics, we propose a suite of ontology metrics, at both the ontology-level and class-level, to measure the design complexity of ontologies. The proposed metrics are analytically evaluated against Weyuker’s criteria. We have also performed empirical analysis on public domain ontologies to show the characteristics and usefulness of the metrics. We point out possible applications of the proposed metrics to ontology quality control. We believe that the proposed metric suite is useful for managing ontology development projects.     

Onyx: A new Canvas-based tool for visualizing biomedical and health ontologies

Ontologies provide formal, machine-readable, and human-interpretable representations of domain knowledge. Therefore, ontologies have come into question with the development of Semantic Web technologies. People who want to use ontologies need an understanding of the ontology, but this understanding is very difficult to attain if the ontology user lacks the background knowledge necessary to comprehend the ontology or if the ontology is very large. Thus, software tools that facilitate the understanding of ontologies are needed. Ontology visualization is an important research area because visualization can help in the development, exploration, verification, and comprehension of ontologies. This paper introduces the design of a new ontology visualization tool, which differs from traditional visualization tools by providing important metrics and analytics about ontology concepts and warning the ontology developer about potential ontology design errors. The tool, called Onyx, also has advantages in terms of speed and readability. Thus, Onyx offers a suitable environment for the representation of large ontologies, especially those used in biomedical and health information systems and those that contain many terms. It is clear that these additional functionalities will increase the value of traditional ontology visualization tools during ontology exploration and evaluation.