GrOWL: A tool for visualization and editing of OWL ontologies

In an effort to optimize visualization and editing of OWL ontologies we have developed GrOWL—a browser and visual editor for OWL that accurately visualizes the underlying DL semantics of OWL ontologies while avoiding the difficulties of the verbose OWL syntax. In this paper, we discuss GrOWL visualization model and the essential visualization techniques implemented in GrOWL.     

Verifying feature models using OWL

Feature models are widely used in domain engineering to capture common and variant features among systems in a particular domain. However, the lack of a formal semantics and reasoning support of feature models has hindered the development of this area. Industrial experiences also show that methods and tools that can support feature model analysis are badly appreciated. Such reasoning tool should be fully automated and efficient. At the same time, the reasoning tool should scale up well since it may need to handle hundreds or even thousands of features a that modern software systems may have. This paper presents an approach to modeling and verifying feature diagrams using Semantic Web OWL ontologies. We use OWL DL ontologies to precisely capture the inter-relationships among the features in a feature diagram. OWL reasoning engines such as FaCT++ are deployed to check for the inconsistencies of feature configurations fully automatically. Furthermore, a general OWL debugger has been developed to tackle the disadvantage of lacking debugging aids for the current OWL reasoner and to complement our verification approach. We also developed a CASE tool to facilitate visual development, interchange and reasoning of feature diagrams in the Semantic Web environment.     

A hybrid ontology approach for integration of obsolescence information

Information sharing among distributed obsolescence management systems is a challenge because of the heterogeneity of data (data with different forms and representations). Indeed, this is the main hurdle that exists for current tools managing product obsolescence. This paper presents a hybrid ontology approach for the integration of obsolescence information that combines a global ontology that provides a shared vocabulary for the specification of the semantics of obsolescence domain knowledge, along with local ontologies that describe structures of multiple data sources distributed in various obsolescence management tools. A procedure is provided for mapping local ontologies to the global ontology by quantifying relationships between classes and identifying groups of classes with a clustering method. Ontologies and rules of identifying relationships are realized with OWL (Web Ontology Language) and SWRL (Semantic Web Rule Language). With the application of the hybrid ontology approach, a unified view of data is provided to support decision making for efficient obsolescence management and a structure where new sources of information can be easily added with little modification in the future.     

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.     

OWL rules: A proposal and prototype implementation

Although the OWL Web Ontology Language adds considerable expressive power to the Semantic Web it does have expressive limitations, particularly with respect to what can be said about properties. We present the Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL), a Horn clause rules extension to OWL that overcomes many of these limitations. SWRL extends OWL in a syntactically and semantically coherent manner: the basic syntax for SWRL rules is an extension of the abstract syntax for OWL DL and OWL Lite; SWRL rules are given formal meaning via an extension of the OWL DL model-theoretic semantics; SWRL rules are given an XML syntax based on the OWL XML presentation syntax; and a mapping from SWRL rules to RDF graphs is given based on the OWL RDF/XML exchange syntax. We discuss the expressive power of SWRL, showing that the ontology consistency problem is undecidable, provide several examples of SWRL usage, and discuss a prototype implementation of reasoning support for SWRL.     

基于语义分析的OWL文档聚类研究

借助目前丰富的网络资源，将同一主题的现存Ontology知识聚类，提供给领域专家或用户进行二次精化和集成是Ontology研究领域的一个重要课题．OWL是目前用于表示和交换Ontology信息的基本标准．本文从OWL的语义本质出发，考虑了知识之间的继承性及复杂类比较和模糊集运算的相似性，提出一种计算OWL文档语义相似性的方式，并和层次聚类算法集成完成了对OWL文档集的聚类实验．实验结果说明本文提出的算法对自动生成和手工建立的OWL文档集都有很好的效果。     

基于EOWL的簇集成协作本体

不同的本体之间通常需要进行协作。标准OWL只是预留了一个owl:import接口，是一种“全盘的肯定方式”。文章提出了一个不同于当前本体之间的约束协作方法，构建了一个本体与外部本体群的协作模型，进而基于OWL进行了扩展(EOWL)，引入了本体的协作接口。利用这种扩展，建立了一个本体的分簇分层次的协作管理机制，这种扩展从本体语言自身解决了本体与外部本体群之间的协作。     

DLEJena: A practical forward-chaining OWL 2 RL reasoner combining Jena and Pellet

This paper describes DLEJena, a practical reasoner for the OWL 2 RL profile that combines the forward-chaining rule engine of Jena and the Pellet DL reasoner. This combination is based on rule templates, instantiating at run-time a set of ABox OWL 2 RL/RDF Jena rules dedicated to a particular TBox that is handled by Pellet. The goal of DLEJena is to handle efficiently, through instantiated rules, the OWL 2 RL ontologies under direct semantics, where classes and properties cannot be at the same time individuals. The TBox semantics are treated by Pellet, reusing in that way efficient and sophisticated TBox DL reasoning algorithms. The experimental evaluation shows that DLEJena achieves more scalable ABox reasoning than the direct implementation of the OWL 2 RL/RDF rule set in the Jena’s production rule engine, which is the main target of the system. DLEJena can be also used as a generic framework for applying an arbitrary number of entailments beyond the OWL 2 RL profile.     

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.     

NCBO Resource Index: Ontology-based search and mining of biomedical resources

The volume of publicly available data in biomedicine is constantly increasing. However, these data are stored in different formats and on different platforms. Integrating these data will enable us to facilitate the pace of medical discoveries by providing scientists with a unified view of this diverse information. Under the auspices of the National Center for Biomedical Ontology (NCBO), we have developed the Resource Index – a growing, large-scale ontology-based index of more than twenty heterogeneous biomedical resources. The resources come from a variety of repositories maintained by organizations from around the world. We use a set of over 200 publicly available ontologies contributed by researchers in various domains to annotate the elements in these resources. We use the semantics that the ontologies encode, such as different properties of classes, the class hierarchies, and the mappings between ontologies, in order to improve the search experience for the Resource Index user. Our user interface enables scientists to search the multiple resources quickly and efficiently using domain terms, without even being aware that there is semantics “under the hood.”     

基于逆向工程的本体构建方法研究

传统正向的本体构建方法需要领域专家的参与,大大降低了开发效率.从逆向工程的角度出发,对本体的构建方法进行了研究.以关系模型为基础,提取出关系数据模式,并在元数据层次上建立了数据源模式与OWL本体之间的映射,实现了本体的逆向构建.最后,根据逆向构建过程给出了一个从关系模式构建OWL本体的原型系统.     

基于本体语言OWL的模糊扩展

本体能够对特定领域的概念、术语以及关系提供一种形式化的描述方法.尽管本体在知识表示上有很强的能力,但是有一个缺陷,即不能表达不确定和不精确的信息.而这些信息在语义网和多媒体应用中,又是至关重要的.针对模糊信息的本体表示问题,本文对本体语言OWL DL进行了基于模糊逻辑的扩展,给出了形式化的语法和语义,并通过一个实例说明了该方法在表达能力上的灵活性. .     

基于语义近似逼近技术的多代理协作

本体在多代理系统中起着重要的作用,它提供和定义了一个共享的语义词汇库。然而,在现实的多代理通讯的过程中,两个代理共享完全相同的语义词汇库是几乎不可能的。因为信息不完整以及本体的异构等特性,一个代理只能部分理解另外一个代理所拥有的本体内容,这使得代理间的通讯非常困难。本文就是探索利用近似逼近技术实现基于部分共享分布式本体的多代理通讯,从而实现多代理之间的协作查询。我们使用基于OWLweb本体语言的描述逻辑来描述分布式本体的近似查询技术。最终我们也开发了基于语义近似逼近方法的一个多代理协调查询系统。     

The Semantic Web Vision: Where Are We?

Semantic Web developers have adopted OWL to represent knowledge. OWL, or a language with similar theoretical foundations, will lead the way in the semantic exploration of the Web. Currently, Web-based standards are the preferred way to represent knowledge. Furthermore, respondents mainly use ontologies to allow both humans and computers to understand knowledge and domain models. Web 3.0 can bring a new breed of spectacular applications compared to Web 2.0. with the same magnitude that separates Web 2.0 from Web 1.0.     

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。