scholarly journals Modular Reuse of Ontologies: Theory and Practice

2008 ◽  
Vol 31 ◽  
pp. 273-318 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. Cuenca Grau ◽  
I. Horrocks ◽  
Y. Kazakov ◽  
U. Sattler

In this paper, we propose a set of tasks that are relevant for the modular reuse of ontologies. In order to formalize these tasks as reasoning problems, we introduce the notions of conservative extension, safety and module for a very general class of logic-based ontology languages. We investigate the general properties of and relationships between these notions and study the relationships between the relevant reasoning problems we have previously identified. To study the computability of these problems, we consider, in particular, Description Logics (DLs), which provide the formal underpinning of the W3C Web Ontology Language (OWL), and show that all the problems we consider are undecidable or algorithmically unsolvable for the description logic underlying OWL DL. In order to achieve a practical solution, we identify conditions sufficient for an ontology to reuse a set of symbols ``safely''---that is, without changing their meaning. We provide the notion of a safety class, which characterizes any sufficient condition for safety, and identify a family of safety classes--called locality---which enjoys a collection of desirable properties. We use the notion of a safety class to extract modules from ontologies, and we provide various modularization algorithms that are appropriate to the properties of the particular safety class in use. Finally, we show practical benefits of our safety checking and module extraction algorithms.

2015 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 535-592 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Steigmiller ◽  
Birte Glimm

Nowadays, saturation-based reasoners for the OWL EL profile of the Web Ontology Language are able to handle large ontologies such as SNOMED very efficiently. However, it is currently unclear how saturation-based reasoning procedures can be extended to very expressive Description Logics such as SROIQ--the logical underpinning of the current and second iteration of the Web Ontology Language. Tableau-based procedures, on the other hand, are not limited to specific Description Logic languages or OWL profiles, but even highly optimised tableau-based reasoners might not be efficient enough to handle large ontologies such as SNOMED. In this paper, we present an approach for tightly coupling tableau- and saturation-based procedures that we implement in the OWL DL reasoner Konclude. Our detailed evaluation shows that this combination significantly improves the reasoning performance for a wide range of ontologies.


Author(s):  
Michael Pradel ◽  
Jakob Henriksson ◽  
Uwe Aßmann

Although ontologies are gaining more and more acceptance, they are often not engineered in a component-based manner due to, among various reasons, a lack of appropriate constructs in current ontology languages. This hampers reuse and makes creating new ontologies from existing building blocks difficult. We propose to apply the notion of roles and role modeling to ontologies and present an extension of the Web Ontology Language OWL for this purpose. Ontological role models allow for clearly separating different concerns of a domain and constitute an intuitive reuse unit.


2004 ◽  
Vol 5 (8) ◽  
pp. 648-654 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gilberto Fragoso ◽  
Sherri de Coronado ◽  
Margaret Haber ◽  
Frank Hartel ◽  
Larry Wright

The NCI Thesaurus is a reference terminology covering areas of basic and clinical science, built with the goal of facilitating translational research in cancer. It contains nearly 110 000 terms in approximately 36000 concepts, partitioned in 20 subdomains, which include diseases, drugs, anatomy, genes, gene products, techniques, and biological processes, among others, all with a cancer-centric focus in content, and originally designed to support coding activities across the National Cancer Institute. Each concept represents a unit of meaning and contains a number of annotations, such as synonyms and preferred name, as well as annotations such as textual definitions and optional references to external authorities. In addition, concepts are modelled with description logic (DL) and defined by their relationships to other concepts; there are currently approximately 90 types of named relations declared in the terminology. The NCI Thesaurus is produced by the Enterprise Vocabulary Services project, a collaborative effort between the NCI Center for Bioinformatics and the NCI Office of Communications, and is part of the caCORE infrastructure stack (http://ncicb.nci.nih.gov/NCICB/core). It can be accessed programmatically through the open caBIO API and browsed via the web (http://nciterms.nci.nih.gov). A history of editing changes is also accessible through the API. In addition, the Thesaurus is available for download in various file formats, including OWL, the web ontology language, to facilitate its utilization by others.


2011 ◽  
Vol 181-182 ◽  
pp. 236-241
Author(s):  
Xian Yi Cheng ◽  
Chen Cheng ◽  
Qian Zhu

As a sort of formalizing tool of knowledge representation, Description Logics have been successfully applied in Information System, Software Engineering and Natural Language processing and so on. Description Logics also play a key role in text representation, Natural Language semantic interpretation and language ontology description. Description Logics have been logical basis of OWL which is an ontology language that is recommended by W3C. This paper discusses the description logic basic ideas under vocabulary semantic, context meaning, domain knowledge and background knowledge.


Author(s):  
Jean Vincent Fonou-Dombeu ◽  
Nadia Naidoo ◽  
Micara Ramnanan ◽  
Rachan Gowda ◽  
Sahil Ramkaran Lawton

The modelling of agriculture with ontologies has been of interest to many authors in the past years. However, no research, currently, has focused on building a knowledge base ontology for the Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) domain. This study attempts to fill this gap through the development of a Climate Smart Agriculture Ontology (OntoCSA). Information was gathered from secondary sources including websites, published research articles and reports as well as related ontologies, to formalize the OntoCSA ontology in Description Logics (DLs). The OntoCSA ontology was developed in Web Ontology Language (OWL) with Protégé. Furthermore, the OntoCSA ontology was successfully validated with the HermiT reasoner within Protégé. The resulting OntoCSA ontology is a machine-readable model of CSA that can be leveraged in web-based applications for the storage, open and automated access and sharing of CSA information/data, for research and dissemination of best practices


2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 19-32
Author(s):  
Abdeslam El Azzouzi ◽  
Kamal Eddine El Kadiri

The increasing development of information systems complicate task of protecting against threats. They have become vulnerable to malicious attacks that may affect the essential properties such as confidentiality, integrity and availability. Then the security becomes an overriding concern. Securing a system begins with prevention methods that are insufficient to reduce the danger of attacks, that must be accomplished by intrusion and attack detection systems. In this paper, a method for detecting web application attacks is proposed. Unlike methods based on signatures, the proposed solution is a technique based on ontology. It describes the Web attacks, the HTTP request, and the application using semantic rules. The system is able to detect effectively the sophisticated attacks by analysing user requests. The semantic rules allow inference about the ontologies models to detect complex variations of web attacks. The ontologies models was developed using description logics which was based Web Ontology Language (OWL). The proposed system is able to be installed on an HTTP server.


Author(s):  
Georgios Meditskos ◽  
Nick Bassiliades

This chapter is focused on the basic principles behind the utilization of rules in order to perform reasoning about the Web Ontology Language (OWL), a Description Logic-based language that is the W3C recommendation for creating and sharing ontologies in the Semantic Web. More precisely, we elaborate on the entailment-based OWL reasoning (EBOR) paradigm, which is based on the utilization of RDF/ RDFS and OWL entailment rules that run on a rule engine, applying the formal semantics of the ontology language. To this end, seven EBOR systems are described and compared, analyzing the different approaches. Despite the closed rule environment, which comes in contrast with the open nature of the Semantic Web, and the fact that OWL semantics are partially mapped into rules, the rule-based OWL reasoning paradigm can give great potentials in the Semantic Web, enabling the utilization of rule engines on top of ontology information.


2003 ◽  
Vol 12 (02) ◽  
pp. 197-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHRIS WROE ◽  
ROBERT STEVENS ◽  
CAROLE GOBLE ◽  
ANGUS ROBERTS ◽  
MARK GREENWOOD

The growing quantity and distribution of bioinformatics resources means that finding and utilizing them requires a great deal of expert knowledge, especially as many resources need to be tied together into a workflow to accomplish a useful goal. We want to formally capture at least some of this knowledge within a virtual workbench and middleware framework to assist a wider range of biologists in utilizing these resources. Different activities require different representations of knowledge. Finding or substituting a service within a workflow is often best supported by a classification. Marshalling and configuring services is best accomplished using a formal description. Both representations are highly interdependent and maintaining consistency between the two by hand is difficult. We report on a description logic approach using the web ontology language DAML+OIL that uses property based service descriptions. The ontology is founded on DAML-S to dynamically create service classifications. These classifications are then used to support semantic service matching and discovery in a large grid based middleware project [Formula: see text]. We describe the extensions necessary to DAML-S in order to support bioinformatics service description; the utility of DAML+OIL in creating dynamic classifications based on formal descriptions; and the implementation of a DAML+OIL ontology service to support partial user-driven service matching and composition.


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