Reasoning of fuzzy relational databases with fuzzy ontologies

A significant interest developed regarding the problem of describing databases with expressive knowledge representation techniques in recent years, so that database reasoning may be handled intelligently. Therefore, it is possible and meaningful to investigate how to reason on fuzzy relational databases (FRDBs) with fuzzy ontologies. In this paper, we first propose a formal approach and an automated tool for constructing fuzzy ontologies from FRDBs, and then we study how to reason on FRDBs with constructed fuzzy ontologies. First, we give their respective formal definitions of FRDBs and fuzzy Web Ontology Language (OWL) ontologies. On the basis of this, we propose a formal approach that can directly transform an FRDB (including its schema and data information) into a fuzzy OWL ontology (consisting of the fuzzy ontology structure and instance). Furthermore, following the proposed approach, we implement a prototype construction tool called FRDB2FOnto. Finally, based on the constructed fuzzy OWL ontologies, we investigate how to reason on FRDBs (e.g., consistency, satisfiability, subsumption, and redundancy) through the reasoning mechanism of fuzzy OWL ontologies, so that the reasoning of FRDBs may be done automatically by means of the existing fuzzy ontology reasoner.© 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

A Rule-Based Object-Oriented OWL Reasoner

In this paper, we describe O-DEVICE, a memory-based knowledge-based system for reasoning and querying OWL ontologies by implementing RDF/OWL entailments in the form of production rules in order to apply the formal semantics of the language. Our approach is based on a transformation procedure of OWL ontologies into an object-oriented schema and the application of inference production rules over the generated objects in order to implement the various semantics of OWL. In order to enhance the performance of the system, we introduce a dynamic approach of generating production rules for ABOX reasoning and an incremental approach of loading ontologies. O-DEVICE is built over the CLIPS production rule system, using the object-oriented language COOL to model and handle ontology concepts and RDF resources. One of the contributions of our work is that we enable a well-known and efficient production rule system to handle OWL ontologies. We argue that although native OWL rule reasoners may process ontology information faster, they lack some of the key features that rule systems offer, such as the efficient manipulation of the information through complex rule programs. We present a comparison of our system with other OWL reasoners, showing that O-DEVICE can constitute a practical rule environment for ontology manipulation.     

Incremental Classification of Description Logics Ontologies

The development of ontologies involves continuous but relatively small modifications. However, existing ontology reasoners do not take advantage of the similarities between different versions of an ontology. In this paper, we propose a collection of techniques for incremental reasoning—that is, reasoning that reuses information obtained from previous versions of an ontology. We have applied our results to incremental classification of OWL ontologies and found significant improvement over regular classification time on a set of real-world ontologies.     

ComR: a combined OWL reasoner for ontology classification

Ontology classification, the problem of computing the subsumption hierarchies for classes (atomic concepts), is a core reasoning service provided by Web Ontology Language (OWL) reasoners. Although general-purpose OWL 2 reasoners employ sophisticated optimizations for classification, they are still not efficient owing to the high complexity of tableau algorithms for expressive ontologies. Profile-specific OWL 2 EL reasoners are efficient; however, they become incomplete even if the ontology contains only a small number of axioms that are outside the OWL 2 EL fragment. In this paper, we present a technique that combines an OWL 2 EL reasoner with an OWL 2 reasoner for ontology classification of expressive SROIQ. To optimize the workload, we propose a task decomposition strategy for identifying the minimal non-EL subontology that contains only necessary axioms to ensure completeness. During the ontology classification, the bulk of the workload is delegated to an efficient OWL 2 EL reasoner and only the minimal non- EL subontology is handled by a less efficient OWL 2 reasoner. The proposed approach is implemented in a prototype ComR and experimental results show that our approach offers a substantial speedup in ontology classification. For the wellknown ontology NCI, the classification time is reduced by 96.9% (resp. 83.7%) compared against the standard reasoner Pellet (resp. the modular reasoner MORe).     

基于OWL本体的UML类图推理

分析UML模型一致性检测的研究意义,以及UML类图推理的研究现状,提出一种基于OWL本体的UML类图推理方案.研究UML类图向OWL本体转换的映射规则,给出UML类图包含关系、可满足性、等价关系和相离关系的判断方法及其推理规则.利用Jena推理机制实现了UML类图包含关系、可满足性、等价关系和相离关系的推理.     

ORM模型转换为OWL 2公理的映射规则

对象角色建模方法ORM目前已发展成为一种本体工程方法。需要将ORM表达的领域知识发布到语义Web上,以供不同应用系统共享和交换。OWL 2是W3C推荐使用的语义Web本体语言。探讨了将ORM模型映射为OWL 2公理的方法,通过模型等价变换和引入新的公理,给出了所有可行的模型映射规则。     

Identification and resolution of conflicts during ontological integration using rules

Abstract: Integration of ontologies of information sources and consumers is an important phase in achieving web‐based interoperability. The present work describes an approach for identifying certain semantic conflicts while integrating ontologies of heterogeneous information sources. This paper is focused on the identification of homonymy and synonymy between elements in ontologies. In the present work the concepts of homonymy and synonymy are synonymous to naming conflicts and entity identifier conflicts, respectively, and partial synonymy is synonymous to schema isomorphism conflicts. The concept of the mask of interoperability is introduced for the identification of synonymy. The mask of interoperability is expressed in a declarative way as a set of rules, which can then be used for resolution of conflicts during integration of ontologies. As proof of concept, ontologies are implemented using the XML‐based ontology language Ontology Web Language (OWL), and the rules are implemented using the emerging rule language Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL). This representation in OWL and SWRL allows the ontology to be executable, flexibly extendable and platform‐independent. The OWL facts and SWRL rules are used by the Jess and Bossam reasoning engine to identify semantic homonymy and synonymy.     

Axiom-based ontology matching

Abstract: Managing multiple ontologies is now a core question in most of the applications that require semantic interoperability. The semantic web is surely the most significant application of this report: the current challenge is not to design, develop and deploy domain ontologies but to define semantic correspondences among multiple ontologies covering overlapping domains. In this paper, we introduce a new approach of ontology matching named axiom-based ontology matching. As this approach is founded on the use of axioms, it is mainly dedicated to heavyweight ontologies, but it can also be applied to lightweight ontologies as a complementary approach to the current techniques based on the analysis of natural language expressions, instances and/or taxonomical structures of ontologies. This new matching paradigm is defined in the context of the conceptual graphs model, where the projection (i.e. the main operator for reasoning with conceptual graphs which corresponds to homomorphism of graphs) is used as a means to semantically match the concepts and the relations of two ontologies through the explicit representation of the axioms in terms of conceptual graphs. We also introduce an ontology of representation, called MetaOCGL, dedicated to the reasoning of heavyweight ontologies at the meta-level.     

Domain-specific ontology of botany

Domain-specific ontologies are greatly useful in knowledge acquisition, sharing and analysis. In this paper, botany-specific ontology for acquiring and analyzing botanical knowledge is presented. The ontology is represented in a set of well-defined categories, and each concept is viewed as an instance of certain category. The authors also introduce botany-specific axioms, an integral part of the ontology, for checking and reasoning with the acquired knowledge. Consistency, completeness and redundancy of the axioms are discussed.     

本体复用方法语义导入的研究与设计

在OWL(web ontology language)中,本体复用主要采用owl:imports.然而,这种复制 粘贴的方式会出现若干问题.基于此,提出一种新的导入原型:语义导入.在本体空间中支持TBox推理机推理和语义导入,以促进本体复用.提出一种基于ALC本体语义导入的TBox推理分布式算法,解决了简单本体空间中Tableaux算法的逻辑推理问题.     

Repairing and reasoning with inconsistent and uncertain ontologies

With the development of semantic web, the quality and correctness of ontologies play more and more important roles in semantic representation and knowledge sharing. However, ontologies are often inconsistent and uncertain in real situations. Because of the difficulty in ensuring the quality of ontologies, there is an increasing need for dealing with the inconsistency and uncertainty in real-world applications of ontological reasoning and management. This paper adopts two methods to handle the inconsistent and uncertain ontologies: the first one is to repair the inconsistency, algorithms RIO and RIUO are proposed to compute the candidate repair set, the consistency of ontology could be recovered through deleting or modifying the axioms in candidate repair set; the second one is to develop a non-standard reasoning method to obtain meaningful answers, algorithms RMU and RMIU are proposed to perform query-specific reasoning methods for inconsistent and uncertain ontologies without changing the original ontologies. Finally the prototype system is constructed and the experiment results validate the usability and effectiveness of our approaches.     

iConAwa - An intelligent context-aware system

Context-awareness becomes an increasingly important concept in the development of mobile and ubiquitous systems. Applications and services, which run in these kinds of highly dynamic environments, should be aware of and adapt to their contexts. Context-aware applications improve and enrich people’s interactions with devices, computers and other people.In this paper, design and development of iConAwa, which is an intelligent context-aware multi-agent system proactively providing mobile users with context-aware information and services, is described. In iConAwa, mobile users can get information and services about nearby resources (attraction points) according to their context and also communicate with each other by exchanging messages. Context and point of interest ontologies are developed in OWL. Context and points of interest are modelled in a flexible and extensible way by the developed ontology models. Knowledge sharing and knowledge reuse are also provided by using these ontology models. iConAwa makes use of rule-based context reasoning which provides derivation of high level implicit context from low level explicit context. With this approach context reasoning is decoupled from the source code of the system. JADE agent development framework is used to develop the agents and Jena semantic web framework is used to manipulate ontologies and for rule based reasoning.     

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.     

语义Web中的本体推理研究

从语义Web的基本概念开始,介绍了语义Web的层次结构;介绍了本体的基本概念以及用于本体描述的几种语言。用W3C推荐的本体描述语言OWL描述了一个本体实例,通过此实例对本体推理在本体建立中的冲突消解、描述优化、本体的合并和实例归类中的应用进行了研究,说明了本体推理在本体建立及本体应用中的作用。本体技术是语义Web的核心技术,所以建立和维护本体是语义Web中的主要工作之一,而基于本体的推理可以帮助建立和维护本体。     

使用OWL DL形式化表达对象角色建模模型

对象角色建模(ORM)方法已应用于本体工程,因此需要将ORM模型转换为OWL DL公理,以便将ORM本体发布到语义Web上,同时还可使用支持DL的推理机来检查ORM本体的语义一致性和冗余问题。通过模型语义分析、模型等价转换、引入新的运算符和特性等方法,提出将ORM模型形式化表达为OWL DL公理的规则。除了外部唯一约束等四种约束外,其他形态的ORM模型都可以形式化表达为OWL DL公理。