A semantic metrics suite for evaluating modular ontologies

Ontologies, which are formal representations of knowledge within a domain, can be used for designing and sharing conceptual models of enterprises information for the purpose of enhancing understanding, communication and interoperability. For representing a body of knowledge, different ontologies may be designed. Recently, designing ontologies in a modular manner has emerged for achieving better reasoning performance, more efficient ontology management and change handling. One of the important challenges in the employment of ontologies and modular ontologies in modeling information within enterprises is the evaluation of the suitability of an ontology for a domain and the performance of inference operations over it. In this paper, we present a set of semantic metrics for evaluating ontologies and modular ontologies. These metrics measure cohesion and coupling of ontologies, which are two important notions in the process of assessing ontologies for enterprise modeling. The proposed metrics are based on semantic-based definitions of relativeness, and dependencies between local symbols, and also between local and external symbols of ontologies. Based on these semantic definitions, not only the explicitly asserted knowledge in ontologies but also the implied knowledge, which is derived through inference, is considered for the sake of ontology assessment. We present several empirical case studies for investigating the correlation between the proposed metrics and reasoning performance, which is an important issue in applicability of employing ontologies in real-world information systems.     

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.     

Methodology and intermediate layer for the automatic creation of ontology instances stored in relational databases

In this paper, we introduce our solution for mapping local ontologies to relational and object‐oriented representations. This solution is part of the GeoNis framework for the interoperability of geo‐information systems applications in a local community environment. The GeoNis framework is based on a hybrid ontology approach for data integration. Therefore, a very important subject in our research on semantic data integration is the creation of mapping between a spatial information source and its local ontology. We developed the OWL2RDB mapping language to create an intermediate layer between a relational database and the OWL ontology. This intermediate layer contains rules (expressed in the OWL2RDB language) for mapping between the structural elements of a relational database and the concepts of OWL ontologies. We also present a system that uses the OWL2RDB intermediate layer to create classes that can handle ontology instances stored in relational databases. We have developed a prototype for a tool that uses this proposed approach for the automatic generation of translator/wrapper components in the GeoNis interoperability environment. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

改进贝叶斯的语义推送算法设计

教育信息语义本体构建是通过语义本体构建方式去设计教育信息本体库。本体间逻辑关系表示方法,是构建出有逻辑结构的教育信息集合的过程。实现教育信息的半结构化数据归类,对不同时间采集的归类数据在规定好的模型中进行计算—词汇频度分析模型。词汇频度分析模型运用逆概率的贝叶斯思想,经过对传统贝叶斯算法与语义本体性质相结合,使MapReduce善于处理半结构化数据;经过对语义本体构建的教育信息数据结合词汇频度分析模型进行计算,获得教育信息本体的推荐能力值E i;通过对不同本体E i值进行排序,获得了推荐信息的顺序;根据推荐权重进行信息的推送工作,同时根据JS指数,经过比较基于词汇频度分析模型与目录结构推送算法的分析结果得出:词汇频度分析模型优于基于目录结构推送算法。     

电子商务环境下产品本体构建技术研究

产品本体通过构建产品类层次及其属性描述为交易双方提供了对产品共享的通用的理解。针对目前电子商务中标准产品本体缺乏产品属性描述的问题，根据电子商务网站中产品信息多以表格形式组织和描述的特点，提出以联合国标准产品与服务分类代码（UNSPSC）为核心本体，结合表格处理技术的半自动产品本体构建方法。以Web表格为对象，对Web表格的识别、表格规范化、单元产品本体及全局产品本体建立进行了研究。这种半自动的本体建立方法可以解决电子商务中的产品信息模型因缺乏标准化的属性描述而产生不一致性，实现对核心产品本体的扩展和补充。     

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.     

A high-level electrical energy ontology with weighted attributes

One of the significant application areas of domain ontologies is known to be text analysis applications like information extraction and text classification systems, and semantic portals. In this paper, we present a high-level ontology for the electrical energy domain. This domain ontology has weighted attributes to cover the inherent fuzziness in the textual representations of its concepts. Additionally, we have included in the ontology the necessary attributes to align the ontology concepts to on-line collaborative knowledge bases like Wikipedia and linked open data sources like DBpedia, other attributes to facilitate its use in multilingual applications, and concepts to hold the named entities in the domain. The ultimate ontology is aligned with the previously proposed ontologies for the energy-related subdomains after extending the latter ones with weighted attributes. We make the ultimate form of the electrical energy ontology, as well as the extended versions of the domain ontologies for the subdomains, available for research purposes. Also included in the paper are sample text analysis applications which mainly exploit the weighted attributes within the ontology.     

一种应用描述逻辑推理实现本体映射的方法

本体匹配用于找到两个本体中元素间的映射关系,是数据库应用领域的一个重要问题.本文提出了一种基于描述逻辑的本体匹配方法,利用语义解释实现匹配.该方法首先利用多匹配器发现字面语义关系,并据此利用描述逻辑推理器推理元素相互间关系.借助概念包含推理设计了概念间关系的判定算法,可推理出各种对应关系,如等价、泛化、特化、相离、相交.该方法最终利用推理器RacerPro实现了本体匹配,最后通过实验证明了方法的有效性.     

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.     

Resolution of Semantic Heterogeneity in Database Schema Integration Using Formal Ontologies

This paper addresses the problem of handling semantic heterogeneity during database schema integration. We focus on the semantics of terms used as identifiers in schema definitions. Our solution does not rely on the names of the schema elements or the structure of the schemas. Instead, we utilize formal ontologies consisting of intensional definitions of terms represented in a logical language. The approach is based on similarity relations between intensional definitions in different ontologies. We present the definitions of similarity relations based on intensional definitions in formal ontologies. The extensional consequences of intensional relations are addressed. The paper shows how similarity relations are discovered by a reasoning system using a higher-level ontology. These similarity relations are then used to derive an integrated schema in two steps. First, we show how to use similarity relations to generate the class hierarchy of the global schema. Second, we explain how to enhance the class definitions with attributes. This approach reduces the cost of generating or re-generating global schemas for tightly-coupled federated databases.     

面向Web信息资源的领域本体模型自动构建机制的研究

领域本体的构建是本体工程研究与应用的重要内容。面向网络Web信息资源,获取领域相关文本信息,通过对文本的概念分析,构建领域本体模型。提出一套本体自动构建机制,该本体构建基于数据挖掘和机器学习技术,内容主要包括基于贝叶斯(Bayes)分类原理;提出多个分类器方式的概念分类过程和算法;提出概念关联分析和概念自学习算法,建立本体原型;提出面向OWL本体模型的转换映射机制,构建基于OWL的本体模型。此外,还提出了从网络资源获取、领域本体建模到本体实施应用的一套完整的本体构建和应用实施的解决方案。     

Merging of axiomatic definitions of concepts in the complex OWL ontologies

In the last decade, ontology matching and mapping research has shown a measurable progress. This topic draws substantial attention within the research community, though it is not fully researched so far and new complex and effective solutions are needed. Current works are limited in finding alignments or mappings between concepts of heterogeneous ontologies. But, once ontology mappings are found, then how they (or their class expressions) are to be integrated automatically is left open for the ontology merging research. This paper elaborates the mapping of class expressions of concepts and contributes an algorithm for their merging in an automatic ontology merging process without any human intervention. However, the challenge of mapping axiomatic definitions is the most difficult task for merging concept definitions of the source ontologies, but it reveals significant increase in precision and recall values. In addition, with the study of these algorithms, we conclude that ontology merging facilitates when one wants to get ontology with the better quality as the combined rich axioms are added in the merged ontology. We also discuss the results of our first successful participation in the Conference, OA4QA and Anatomy track of OAEI 2015.     

Defining structural properties of ontologies

To define properties of ontologies exactly, a set of ontology models in the form of marked graphs is proposed. To each class of properties its own graph model is attached with established general scheme, way of interpretation, and rules of extracting the structure from the ontology text. Structural properties of ontologies are unambiguously given in terms of graph models. These definitions can be used to evaluate properties of particular ontologies, which is done in two stages. The first stage deals with constructing internal models of ontologies in the form of graph models. At the second stage, the values of structural properties of ontology are obtained using the corresponding graph models of the evaluated ontology and according to the definitions of these properties.     

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).     

DW中一种基于本体的语义集成方法研究

文中介绍了数据仓库领域一种基于本体的语义集成方法。首先建立领域本体和数据源的局部本体,然后通过局部本体对应的概念树间的映射算法得到数据源全局本体,再和领域本体映射,得到映射关系。最后通过本体推理,得出隐含的语义关系,用最终的语义关系来指导数据抽取、转换和加载过程,实现数据仓库语义程度上的数据集成。     

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.     

Ontology and rule-based natural language processing approach for interpreting textual regulations on underground utility infrastructure

The nation’s massive underground utility infrastructure must comply with a multitude of regulations. The regulatory compliance checking of underground utilities requires an objective and consistent interpretation of the regulations. However, utility regulations contain a variety of domain-specific terms and numerous spatial constraints regarding the location and clearance of underground utilities. It is challenging for the interpreters to understand both the domain and spatial semantics in utility regulations. To address the challenge, this paper adopts an ontology and rule-based Natural Language Processing (NLP) framework to automate the interpretation of utility regulations – the extraction of regulatory information and the subsequent transformation into logic clauses. Two new ontologies have been developed. The urban product ontology (UPO) is domain-specific to model domain concepts and capture domain semantics on top of heterogeneous terminologies in utility regulations. The spatial ontology (SO) consists of two layers of semantics – linguistic spatial expressions and formal spatial relations – for better understanding the spatial language in utility regulations. Pattern-matching rules defined on syntactic features (captured using common NLP techniques) and semantic features (captured using ontologies) were encoded for information extraction. The extracted information elements were then mapped to their semantic correspondences via ontologies and finally transformed into deontic logic (DL) clauses to achieve the semantic and logical formalization. The approach was tested on the spatial configuration-related requirements in utility accommodation policies. Results show it achieves a 98.2% precision and a 94.7% recall in information extraction, a 94.4% precision and a 90.1% recall in semantic formalization, and an 83% accuracy in logical formalization.     

基于机器学习的本体概念相似性研究

现有的知识系统使用的是集中式的、一致性的、可扩充的Ontology库,不同本体间的语义匹配是语义网发展面临的最富挑战性的问题之一。本文针对领域中存在不同的Ontology的问题,讨论了一种基于多策略机器学习的Ontology匹配方法,重点分析了本体概念的相似度计算,并提出了一种相似度测量算法。