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.     

A survey on metadata for describing and retrieving Internet resources

Metadata, or information that makes data useful, have been considered by the database community basically as data in dictionaries used to control database management systems operations. More recently, metadata have been used to describe digital resources available across networks. This paper presents a survey of the state of the art concerning the use and importance of metadata, focusing on different standards and models found in the literature, describing how they serve as a basis for integrating heterogeneous resources on the Web and for developing more sophisticated search mechanisms.     

Possible Ontologies: How Reality Constrains the Development of Relevant Ontologies

For years, ontologies have been known in computer science as consensual models of domains of discourse, usually implemented as formal definitions of the relevant conceptual entities. Researchers have written much about the potential benefits of using them, and most of us regard ontologies as central building blocks of the semantic Web and other semantic systems. Unfortunately, the number and quality of actual, "non-toy" ontologies available on the Web today is remarkably low. This implies that the semantic Web community has yet to build practically useful ontologies for a lot of relevant domains in order to make the semantic Web a reality. Theoretically minded advocates often assume that the lack of ontologies is because the "stupid business people haven't realized ontologies' enormous benefits." As a liberal market economist, the author assumes that humans can generally figure out what's best for their well-being, at least in the long run, and that they act accordingly. In other words, the fact that people haven't yet created as many useful ontologies as the ontology research community would like might indicate either unresolved technical limitations or the existence of sound rationales for why individuals refrain from building them - or both. Indeed, several social and technical difficulties exist that put a brake on developing and eventually constrain the space of possible ontologies     

Ontologies for enterprise knowledge management

Several challenges exist related to applying ontologies in real-world environments. The authors present an integrated enterprise-knowledge management architecture, focusing on how to support multiple ontologies and manage ontology evolution.     

Using Ontologies and Vocabularies for Dynamic Linking

Ontology-based linking offers a solution to some of the problems with static, restricted, and inflexible traditional Web linking. Conceptual hypermedia provides navigation between Web resources, supported by a conceptual model, in which an ontology's definitions and structure, together with the lexical labels, drive the consistency of link provision and the linking's dynamic aspects. Lightweight standard representations make it possible to use existing vocabularies to support Web navigation and browsing. In this way, the navigation and linking of diverse resources (including those not in our control) based on a community understanding of the domain can be consistently managed.     

Ontologies for Knowledge Management: An Information Systems Perspective

Knowledge management research focuses on concepts, methods, and tools supporting the management of human knowledge. The main objective of this paper is to survey basic concepts that have been used in computer science for the representation of knowledge and summarize some of their advantages and drawbacks. A secondary objective is to relate these techniques to information science theory and practice.The survey classifies the concepts used for knowledge representation into four broad ontological categories. Static ontologies describe static aspects of the world, i.e., what things exist, their attributes and relationships. A dynamic ontology, on the other hand, describes the changing aspects of the world in terms of states, state transitions and processes. Intentional ontologies encompass the world of things agents believe in, want, prove or disprove, and argue about. Finally, social ontologies cover social settings – agents, positions, roles, authority, permanent organizational structures or shifting networks of alliances and interdependencies.     

Ontologies for supporting negotiation in e-commerce

In this paper we present our experience in applying Semantic Web technology to automated negotiation. This result is a novel approach to automated negotiation, that is particularly suitable to open environments such as the Internet. In this approach, agents can negotiate in any type of marketplace regardless of the negotiation mechanism in use. In order to support a wide variety of negotiation mechanisms, protocols are not hard-coded in the agents participating to negotiations, but are expressed in terms of a shared ontology, thus making this approach particularly suitable for applications such as electronic commerce. The paper describes a novel approach to negotiation, where the negotiation protocol does not need to be hard-coded in agents, but it is represented by an ontology: an explicit and declarative representation of the negotiation protocol. In this approach, agents need very little prior knowledge of the protocol, and acquire this knowledge directly from the marketplace. The ontology is also used to tune agents’ strategies to the specific protocol used. The paper presents this novel approach and describes the experience gained in implementing the ontology and the learning mechanism to tune the strategy.     

利用本体和主题词表的集成构造RDF模式

为了减少语义异构性带来的信息发现、集成和存取的困难,论述了语义元数据构造,提出了通过集成现存的本体和主题词表构造元数据模式的一种新方法,即元数据模式构造的两步方法:在主题词T和本体O之间的连接关系规范;概念主题词表的自动构造.这个集成基于主题词术语和本体概念之间的蕴含关系规范,并产生具体应用的元数据模式,同时也给出利用结果元数据模式构造RDF模式的过程.     

利用本体和主题词表的集成构造RDF模式

为了减少语义异构性带来的信息发现、集成和存取的困难,论述了语义元数据构造,提出了通过集成现存的本体和主题词表构造元数据模式的一种新方法,即元数据模式构造的两步方法:在主题词T和本体O之间的连接关系规范;概念主题词表的自动构造。这个集成基于主题词术语和本体概念之间的蕴含关系规范,并产生具体应用的元数据模式,同时也给出利用结果元数据模式构造RDF模式的过程。     

Ontologies for conceptual modeling: their creation, use, and management

Although ontologies have been proposed as an important and natural means of representing real world knowledge for the development of database designs, most ontology creation is not carried out systematically. To be truly useful, a repository of ontologies, organized by application domain is needed, along with procedures for creating and integrating ontologies into database design methodologies. This research proposes a methodology for creating and managing domain ontologies. An architecture for an ontology management system is presented and implemented in a prototype. Empirical validation of the prototype demonstrates the effectiveness of the research.     

Quality criteria for bibliographic databases

Quality criteria have been formulated for bibliographic databases. The peculiarities of satisfaction for a set of criteria in the leading polythematic databases of the world represented in the STN International network and VINITI database have been considered.     

一种本体编辑及可视化工具

随着本体的广泛应用,构建实用本体的重要性愈加突出。在中文领域,支持中文的本体构建工具不够完善,迫切需要高效、符合中文习惯的本体开发工具。利用protégé-owl API对本体进行底层操作,利用Prefuse库实现可视化,采用MVC框架开发了一款中文本体编辑及可视化工具。实验表明,该软件能够有效地对中文本体进行编辑和可视化,为中文本体的构建者提供了更加适合中文的本体构建平台。     

基于范畴论的本体描述方法

针对各种本体语言在描述本体过程中容易产生理解不一致的问题,利用范畴论的抽象性及图形化表示的优势,提出一种基于范畴论的本体描述方法,并给出了本体、本体映射和本体实例化的范畴论定义,其中本体被描述成范畴中的对象,本体间的映射被描述成范畴中对象间的同态射,本体实例化被描述成范畴间的函子。在此基础上,结合共极限和推出给出本体合并的描述及解释,并证明了本体合并的一些典型性质。     

OntoRBAC：基于本体的RBAC策略描述与集成

随着分布式安全系统研究的不断深入和发展，基于策略的体系结构已经逐步成为了访问控制系统中的一种主流方法。然而这些策略的定义均建立在特定的语言基础上。如何在异构的系统间进行集成尚缺乏有效的机制。本文提出了一种基于本体的访问控制策略定义机制——OntoRBAC——它完全支持了RBAC96模型，利用本体这个工具，能够为访问控制策略的制定提供更精确、更强大的描述能力，并且可以实现从语义层次上对不同策略的集成。而借助于SWRL（Semantic Web Rule Language），我们定义了多条适用于OntoRBAC的规则来进行对访问控制决策的推理。最后，介绍了这个系统的实现框架。     

Ontologies for Specifying and Reconciling Contexts of Web Services

This paper presents an ontology-based approach for the specification (using as a definition language) and reconciliation (using as a mediation tool) of contexts of Web services. Web services are independent components that can be triggered and composed for the satisfaction of user needs (e.g., hotel booking). Because Web services originate from different providers, their composition faces the obstacle of the context heterogeneity featuring these Web services. An unawareness of this context heterogeneity during Web services composition and execution results in a lack of the quality and relevancy of information that permits tracking the composition, monitoring the execution, and handling exceptions.     

Ontologies as facilitators for repurposing web documents

This paper investigates the role of ontologies as a central part of an architecture to repurpose existing material from the web. A prototype system called ArtEquAKT is presented, which combines information extraction, knowledge management and consolidation techniques and adaptive document generation.All of these components are co-ordinated using one central ontology, providing a common vocabulary for describing the information fragments as they are processed. Each of the components of the architecture is described in detail and an evaluation of the system discussed. Conclusions are drawn as to the effectiveness of such an approach and further challenges are outlined.     

Constructing Consensus Ontologies for the Semantic Web: A Conceptual Approach

Organizational knowledge typically comes from numerous independent sources, each with its own semantics. This paper describes a methodology by which information from large numbers of such sources can be associated, organized, and merged. The hypothesis is that a multiplicity of ontology fragments, representing the semantics of the independent sources, can be related to each other automatically without the use of a global ontology. That is, any pair of ontologies can be related indirectly through a semantic bridge consisting of many other previously unrelated ontologies, even when there is no way to determine a direct relationship between them. The relationships among the ontology fragments indicate the relationships among the sources, enabling the source information to be categorized and organized. An evaluation of the methodology has been conducted by relating numerous small, independently developed ontologies for several domains. A nice feature of the methodology is that common parts of the ontologies reinforce each other, while unique parts are deemphasized. The result is a consensus ontology.     

Ontologies for information management: balancing formality, stability, and sharing scope

Ontologies are an emerging paradigm to support declarativity, interoperability, and intelligent services in many areas, such as Agent-based Computation, Distributed Information Systems, and Expert Systems. Inspired by the definition of ‘ontology’, we discuss three dimensions of information that have fundamental impact on the usefulness of ontologies for information management: formality, stability, and sharing scope of information. We briefly sketch some techniques, which are suited to find a balance (in terms of cost-benefit ratio) in each of these dimensions when building and using ontology-based information systems. We characterize roles of ontology-related actors with respect to goals, knowledge, competencies, rights, and obligations. These roles allow to form ontology societies where specific mechanisms and processes can be installed to stabilize a steady state in the three dimensions discussed. The practical use of our approach is shown in the scenario of a distributed Organizational Memory architecture.     

Measuring Concept Similarities in Multimedia Ontologies: Analysis and Evaluations

The recent development of large-scale multimedia concept ontologies has provided a new momentum for research in the semantic analysis of multimedia repositories. Different methods for generic concept detection have been extensively studied, but the question of how to exploit the structure of a multimedia ontology and existing inter-concept relations has not received similar attention. In this paper, we present a clustering-based method for modeling semantic concepts on low-level feature spaces and study the evaluation of the quality of such models with entropy-based methods. We cover a variety of methods for assessing the similarity of different concepts in a multimedia ontology. We study three ontologies and apply the proposed techniques in experiments involving the visual and semantic similarities, manual annotation of video, and concept detection. The results show that modeling inter-concept relations can provide a promising resource for many different application areas in semantic multimedia processing.