A redundancy-based method for the extraction of relation instances from the Web

The Semantic Web requires automatic ontology population methods. We developed an approach, that given existing ontologies, extracts instances of ontology relations, a specific subtask of ontology population. We use generic, domain-independent techniques to extract candidate relation instances from the Web and exploit the redundancy of information on the Web to compensate for loss of precision caused by the use of these generic methods. The candidate relation instances are then ranked based on co-occurrence with a small seed set. In an experiment, we extracted instances of the relation between artists and art styles. The results were manually evaluated against selected art resources. The method was also tested in the football domain. We also compare the performance of our ranking to that of a Google-hit count-based method.     

Towards Ontology Generation from Tables

At the heart of today's information-explosion problems are issues involving semantics, mutual understanding, concept matching, and interoperability. Ontologies and the Semantic Web are offered as a potential solution, but creating ontologies for real-world knowledge is nontrivial. If we could automate the process, we could significantly improve our chances of making the Semantic Web a reality. While understanding natural language is difficult, tables and other structured information make it easier to interpret new items and relations. In this paper we introduce an approach to generating ontologies based on table analysis. We thus call our approach TANGO (Table ANalysis for Generating Ontologies). Based on conceptual modeling extraction techniques, TANGO attempts to (i) understand a table's structure and conceptual content; (ii) discover the constraints that hold between concepts extracted from the table; (iii) match the recognized concepts with ones from a more general specification of related concepts; and (iv) merge the resulting structure with other similar knowledge representations. TANGO is thus a formalized method of processing the format and content of tables that can serve to incrementally build a relevant reusable conceptual ontology.     

Automatic extraction of OWL ontologies from UML class diagrams: a semantics-preserving approach

Full implementation of the Semantic Web requires widespread availability of OWL ontologies. Manual ontology development using current OWL editors remains a tedious and cumbersome task that requires significant understanding of the new ontology language and can easily result in a knowledge acquisition bottleneck. On the other hand, abundant domain knowledge has been specified by existing database schemata such as UML class diagrams. Thus developing an automatic tool for extracting OWL ontologies from existing UML class diagrams is helpful to Web ontology development. In this paper we propose an automatic, semantics-preserving approach for extracting OWL ontologies from existing UML class diagrams. This approach establishes a precise conceptual correspondence between UML and OWL through a semantics-preserving schema translation algorithm. The experiments with our implemented prototype tool, UML2OWL, show that the proposed approach is effective and a fully automatic ontology extraction is achievable. The proposed approach and tool will facilitate the development of Web ontologies and the realization of semantic interoperations between existing Web database applications and the Semantic Web.     

基于关系数据库的模糊本体的存储方法

模糊本体被广泛用来描述语义Web上的模糊信息。如何对模糊本体进行有效的存储,逐渐成为语义Web领域一个重要的研究课题。鉴于关系数据库在数据组织与管理方面的优势,提出基于关系数据库的模糊本体的存储方法。首先,通过对RDF数据类型进行模糊扩展,给出模糊本体中模糊数据类型的表示方法;然后,提出了基于关系数据库的模糊本体的存储模式以及模糊本体的结构和实例在关系数据库中的存储方法;最后,证明了该存储方法的正确性。基于关系数据库的模糊本体的存储方法为语义Web中模糊数据的存储和管理提供了一个有效的解决方案。     

Automated ontology construction for unstructured text documents

Ontology is playing an increasingly important role in knowledge management and the Semantic Web. This study presents a novel episode-based ontology construction mechanism to extract domain ontology from unstructured text documents. Additionally, fuzzy numbers for conceptual similarity computing are presented for concept clustering and taxonomic relation definitions. Moreover, concept attributes and operations can be extracted from episodes to construct a domain ontology, while non-taxonomic relations can be generated from episodes. The fuzzy inference mechanism is also applied to obtain new instances for ontology learning. Experimental results show that the proposed approach can effectively construct a Chinese domain ontology from unstructured text documents.     

基于层次关联规则的日志本体事件领域关系学习*

为发现Web 使用记录中潜在的用户访问行为,提出了一种基于层次关联规则的日志本体事件领域关系学习方法。该方法利用日志本体中复合事件与原子事件之间的整分关系确定事务粒度,将关联规则挖掘算法扩展到事件层次结构上以发现候选频繁用户使用规则,在此基础上修剪冗余和无效的规则后抽取出事件间潜在的领域关系,达到丰富日志本体的目的。最后进行仿真实验,实验结果表明了该方法的可行性和有效性。     

A semantic role labelling-based framework for learning ontologies from Spanish documents

Currently, most of the information available in the Web is adapted primarily for human consumption, but there is so much information that can no longer be processed by a person in a reasonable time, either in digital or physical formats. To solve this problem, the idea of the Semantic Web arose. The Semantic Web deals with adding machine-readable information to Web pages. Ontologies represent a very important element of this web, as they provide a valid and robust structure to represent knowledge based on concepts, relations, axioms, etc. The need for overcoming the bottleneck provoked by the manual construction of ontologies has generated several studies and research on obtaining semiautomatic methods to learn ontologies. In this sense, this paper proposes a new ontology learning methodology based on semantic role labeling from digital Spanish documents. The method makes it possible to represent multiple semantic relations specially taxonomic and partonomic ones in the standardized OWL 2.0. A set of experiments has been performed with the approach implemented in educational domain that show promising results.     

A methodology for constructing of philosophy ontology based on philosophical texts

An ontology is a crucial factor for the success of the Semantic Web and other knowledge-based systems in terms of share and reuse of domain knowledge. However, there are a few concrete ontologies within actual knowledge domains including learning domains. In this paper, we develop an ontology which is an explicit formal specification of concepts and semantic relations among them in philosophy. We call it a philosophy ontology. Our philosophy is a formal specification of philosophical knowledge including knowledge of contents of classical texts of philosophy. We propose a methodology, which consists of detailed guidelines and templates, for constructing text-based ontology. Our methodology consists of 3 major steps and 14 minor steps. To implement the philosophy ontology, we develop an ontology management system based on Topic Maps. Our system includes a semi-automatic translator for creating Topic Map documents from the output of conceptualization steps and other tools to construct, store, retrieve ontologies based on Topic Maps. Our methodology and tools can be applied to other learning domain ontologies, such as history, literature, arts, and music.     

中文网页语义标注:由句子到RDF表示

语义网远景的实现需要自动化的语义标注方法,提出了一种在领域本体指导下,针对中文网页的语义标注方法,运用统计学方法与自然语言处理技术,以文档中句子为处理对象,采取识别和组合两个阶段来完成句子向RDF表示的映射,它具有以下特点:以统计方法获得领域相关词汇,构造领域词汇标注列表作为外部领域知识,降低对通用语言本体的依赖;显式的属性类型标注方法识别出句子中表达关系的词汇,标注为属性类型,利于后续关系抽取;构造句子的句法依存关系树(森林),按照依存关系对词汇进行组合,形成RDF陈述.实验结果显示此方法较基于主谓宾语法关系的语义标注方法更为有效.     

Semantic Web Technologies for supporting learning assessment

The use of Semantic Web Technologies in eLearning has become more significant in recent years. A topic that has received less attention to date is the use of such technologies for supporting assessment processes. In this paper, an approach that makes use of Semantic Web Technologies to support the assessment of open questions in eLearning courses is described. This methodology combines domain ontologies, semantic annotations and semantic similarity measurements. It also incorporates an algorithm for extracting knowledge from students’ answers. It has been applied in different courses and the results are also reported and discussed. In our approach, the behaviour of the algorithm for calculating the referred semantic similarity is defined by the teacher.     

DOF: a generic approach of domain ontology fuzzification

Although recent studies on the Semantic Web have focused on crisp ontologies and knowledge representation, they have paid less attention to imprecise knowledge. However, the results of these studies constitute a Semantic Web that can answer requests almost perfectly with respect to precision. Nevertheless, they ensure low recall. As such, we propose in this research work a new generic approach of fuzzification that which allows a semantic representation of crisp and fuzzy data in a domain ontology. In the framework of our real case study, the obtained illustrate that our approach is highly better than the crisp one in terms of completeness, comprehensiveness, generality, comprehension and shareability.     

Managing multiple and distributed ontologies on the Semantic Web

In traditional software systems, significant attention is devoted to keeping modules well separated and coherent with respect to functionality, thus ensuring that changes in the system are localized to a handful of modules. Reuse is seen as the key method in reaching that goal. Ontology-based systems on the Semantic Web are just a special class of software systems, so the same principles apply. In this article, we present an integrated framework for managing multiple and distributed ontologies on the Semant ic Web. It is based on the representation model for ontologies, trading off between expressivity and tractability. In our framework, we provide features for reusing existing ontologies and for evolving them while retaining the consistency. The approach is implemented within KAON, the Karlsruhe Ontology and Semantic Web tool suite.Received: 18 November 2002, Accepted: 16 April 2003, Published online: 17 September 2003Edited by: Edited by B.V. Atluri, A. Joshi, and Y. YeshaA. Maedche: maedche@fzi.de     

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.     

OntoMiner: bootstrapping and populating ontologies from domain-specific Web sites

Key to the Semantic Web idea are ontologies that can transform legacy HTML documents into Semantic Web documents and encode domain knowledge to facilitate automated reasoning. The techniques presented in the paper can help bootstrap and populate specialized domain ontologies.     

Coupling semantic and statistical techniques for dynamically enriching web ontologies

With the development of the Semantic Web technology, the use of ontologies to store and retrieve information covering several domains has increased. However, very few ontologies are able to cope with the ever-growing need of frequently updated semantic information or specific user requirements in specialized domains. As a result, a critical issue is related to the unavailability of relational information between concepts, also coined missing background knowledge. One solution to address this issue relies on the manual enrichment of ontologies by domain experts which is however a time consuming and costly process, hence the need for dynamic ontology enrichment. In this paper we present an automatic coupled statistical/semantic framework for dynamically enriching large-scale generic ontologies from the World Wide Web. Using the massive amount of information encoded in texts on the Web as a corpus, missing background knowledge can therefore be discovered through a combination of semantic relatedness measures and pattern acquisition techniques and subsequently exploited. The benefits of our approach are: (i) proposing the dynamic enrichment of large-scale generic ontologies with missing background knowledge, and thus, enabling the reuse of such knowledge, (ii) dealing with the issue of costly ontological manual enrichment by domain experts. Experimental results in a precision-based evaluation setting demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed techniques.     

从ER模式到OWL DL本体的语义保持的翻译

提出了一种从ER模式到OWL DL本体的语义保持的翻译方法.该方法在形式化表示ER模式的基础上,建立ER模式和OWL DL本体之间精确的概念对应,通过一个翻译算法按照一组预定义的映射规则实现模式翻译.理论分析表明,该方法是语义保持的和有效的;算法实现和案例研究进一步证实,完全自动的机器翻译是可实现的.该文方法是原创性的,为Web本体的开发以及数据库和语义Web之间语义互操作的实现开辟了一条有效途径.     

Piazza: mediation and integration infrastructure for Semantic Web data

The Semantic Web envisions a World Wide Web in which data is described with rich semantics and applications can pose complex queries. To this point, researchers have defined new languages for specifying meanings for concepts and developed techniques for reasoning about them, using RDF as the data model. To flourish, the Semantic Web needs to provide interoperability—both between sites with different terminologies and with existing data and the applications operating on them. To achieve this, we are faced with two problems. First, most of the world’s data is available not in RDF but in XML; XML and the applications consuming it rely not only on the domain structure of the data, but also on its document structure. Hence, to provide interoperability between such sources, we must map between both their domain structures and their document structures. Second, data management practitioners often prefer to exchange data through local point-to-point data translations, rather than mapping to common mediated schemas or ontologies.This paper describes the Piazza system, which addresses these challenges. Piazza offers a language for mediating between data sources on the Semantic Web, and it maps both the domain structure and document structure. Piazza also enables interoperation of XML data with RDF data that is accompanied by rich OWL ontologies. Mappings in Piazza are provided at a local scale between small sets of nodes, and our query answering algorithm is able to chain sets mappings together to obtain relevant data from across the Piazza network. We also describe an implemented scenario in Piazza and the lessons we learned from it.     

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。