Domain-specific formal ontology of archaeology and its application in knowledge acquisition and analysis

Inherent heterogeneity and distribution of knowledge strongly prevent knowledge from sharing and reusing among different agents and software entities, and a formal ontology has been viewed as a promising means to tackle this problem. In this paper, a domain-specific formal ontology of archaeology is presented. The ontology mainly consists of three parts: archaeological knowledge, but also provides archaeology with an explicit and formal specification of a shared conceptualization, thus making archaeological knowledge shareable and reusable across humans and machines in a structured fashion. Further, we propose a method to verify ontology correctness based on the individuals of categories. As applications of the ontology, we have developed an ontology-driven approach to knowledge acquisition from archaeological text and a question answering system for archaeological knowledge. This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 60073017 and 60273019), and the Ministry of Science and Technology (Grant Nos.2001CCA03000 and 2002DEA30036). Chun-Xia Zhang is a Ph.D. candidate of Institute of Computing Technology (ICT), the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). Her main research interests are ontology analysis and automatic knowledge acquisition from archaeological texts. Cun-Gen Cao is a professor of ICT, CAS. His research interests include knowledge acquisition and sharing, text mining and intelligent tutoring. Fang Gu is a Ph.D. candidate of ICT, CAS. Her main research interests are ontological engineering and knowledge acquisition. Jin-Xin Si is a Ph.D. candidate of ICT, CAS. His main research interests are ontology management and knowledge acquisition.