A formally specified ontology management API as a registry for ubiquitous computing systems

Recently, several standards have emerged for ontology markup languages that can be used to formalize all kinds of knowledge. However, there are no widely accepted standards yet that define APIs to manage ontological data. Processing ontological information still suffers from the heterogeneity imposed by the plethora of available ontology management systems. Moreover, ubiquitous computing environments usually comprise software components written in a variety of different programming languages, which makes it particularly difficult to establish a common ontology management API with programming language agnostic semantics. We implemented an ontological Knowledge Base Server, which can expose the functionality of arbitrary off-the-shelf ontology management systems via a formally specified and well defined API. A case study was carried out in order to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach to use a formally specified ontology management API to implement a registry for ubiquitous computing systems.     

Developing taxonomy for the domain ontology of construction contractual semantics: A case study on the AIA A201 document

In construction contractual management, sharing experts’ domain knowledge through ontology is a good way to narrow the knowledge gap between the domain experts and the construction team. However, little work has been done on ontology taxonomy development in this domain. Based on a literature review on sharing domain knowledge, taxonomy development methods and the essence of construction contracts, this study proposes a synthesized methodology for taxonomy development in the domain of construction contractual semantics. This methodology is based on an ontological model extracted from definitions found in the contract, and uses common root concepts as the initial root concept classes, and includes the iterative development and competency questions approaches as well. In the case study, using the research results from pilot studies, the proposed methodology was applied to the AIA A201 General Conditions of the Contract for Construction (2007) document at the textual level. As a result, a taxonomy was developed which was used to determine the validity of the proposed methodology. The taxonomy development methodology and the developed taxonomy itself are both valuable contributions in the quest to further develop ontology-based applications for sharing domain knowledge about construction contract semantics.     

Decision making with a fuzzy ontology

Knowledge mobilisation is a transition from the prevailing knowledge management technology that has been widely used in industry for the last 20?years to a new methodology and some innovative methods for knowledge representation, formation and development and for knowledge retrieval and distribution. Knowledge mobilisation aims at coming to terms with some of the problems of knowledge management and at the same time to introduce new theory, new methods and new technology. More precisely, this paper presents an outline of a fuzzy ontology as an enhanced version of classical ontology and demonstrates some advantages for practical decision making. We show that a number of soft computing techniques, e.g. aggregation functions and interval valued fuzzy numbers, will support effective and practical decision making on the basis of the fuzzy ontology. We demonstrate the knowledge mobilisation methods with the construction of a support system for finding the best available wine for a number of wine drinking occasions using a fuzzy wine ontology and fuzzy reasoning methods; the support system has been implemented for a Nokia N900 smart phone.     

一种支持软件知识共享的本体模型研究

为了支持分布式环境下项目团队成员之间软件开发知识有效的共享,需要对软件开发知识以及它们之间的关系进行分析和定义。根据软件开发知识的内容、特点以及它们之间的关系,对软件开发知识进行了形式化的表示,并创建了软件开发知识本体和软件开发知识本体规则。通过protégé 和Jena实现对此本体的创建、存储和对此本体规则的SPARQL形式转换,据此形成知识本体库来支持软件开发知识共享。     

Semantic oriented ontology cohesion metrics for ontology-based systems

Ontologies play a core role to provide shared knowledge models to semantic-driven applications targeted by Semantic Web. Ontology metrics become an important area because they can help ontology engineers to assess ontology and better control project management and development of ontology based systems, and therefore reduce the risk of project failures. In this paper, we propose a set of ontology cohesion metrics which focuses on measuring (possibly inconsistent) ontologies in the context of dynamic and changing Web. They are: Number of Ontology Partitions (NOP), Number of Minimally Inconsistent Subsets (NMIS) and Average Value of Axiom Inconsistencies (AVAI). These ontology metrics are used to measure ontological semantics rather than ontological structure. They are theoretically validated for ensuring their theoretical soundness, and further empirically validated by a standard test set of debugging ontologies. The related algorithms to compute these ontology metrics also are discussed. These metrics proposed in this paper can be used as a very useful complementarity of existing ontology cohesion metrics.     

Part 3: Advanced course of ontological engineering

This article deals with advanced topics of ontological engineering to convince readers ontology is more than a rule base of terminological problems and is worth to consider a promising methodology in the next generation knowledge processing research. Needless to say, ontology in AI is tightly connected to ontology in philosophy. The first topic here is on philosophical issues which are very important to properly understand what an ontology is. After defining class, instance andis-a relation, we point out some typical inappropriate uses ofis-a relation in existing ontologies and analyze the reasons why. Other topics are basic ontological distinction, part-of relation, and so on. As an advanced example of ontology, an ontology of representation is extensively discussed. To conclude this tutorial, a success story of ontological engineering is presented. It is concerned with a new kind of application of ontology, that is, knowledge systematization. An ontology-based framework for functional knowledge sharing has been deployed into a company for two years and has been a great success. Finally, future of ontological engineering is discussed followed by concluding remarks. Riichiro Mizoguchi, Ph.D.: He is Professor of the Department of Knowledge Systems, the Institute of Scientific and Industrial Research, Osaka University. He received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from Osaka University in 1972, 1974 and 1977 respectively. From 1978 to 1986 he was research associate in the Institute of Scientific and Industrial Research, Osaka University. From 1986 to 1989 he was Associate Professor there. His research interests include Non-parametric data analyses, Knowledge-based systems, Ontological engineering and Intelligent learning support systems. He is a member of the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence, the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communica-tion Engineers, the Information Processing Society of Japan, the Japanese Society for Information and Systems in Education, Intl. AI in Education (IAIED) Soc., AAAI, IEEE and APC of AACE. Currently, he is President of IAIED Soc. and APC of AACE. He received honorable mention for the Pattern Recognition Society Award, the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers Award, 10th Anniversary Paper Award from the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence and Best paper Award of ICCE99 in 1985, 1988, 1996 and 1999, respectively. He can be reached at miz@ei.sanken.osaka-u.ac.jp     

城市大脑知识图谱构建及应用研究

随着城市大脑建设进程的推进,城市中积累了大量的物联网(IoT)设备和数据,利用海量设备数据对问题进行分析和溯源,对于城市大脑建设具有重要意义。该文基于资源描述框架和智能物联网协议概念,提出一种以城市物联网本体为基础的城市大脑知识图谱建设方法,城市大脑知识图谱模型融合多源异构数据,覆盖城市基本要素,实现对城市要素的全面感知和深度认知。该文重点探究了城市事件本体中的事件抽取,设计了一种新颖的语言模型框架对事件类型和论元联合抽取,与单模型分析对比,该联合模型较单模型的事件类型和论元F₁值分别提高0.4%和2.7%,在时间和模型复杂度上,较单模型级联也有更好效果。最后,该研究对知识图谱技术与人工智能、多传感器融合、GIS等新一代信息技术交叉融合方面进行了探究分析,为城市治理和服务应用场景提供理论依据。     

服务于本体逻辑理论的本体定义

本体概念过分模糊和庞大,不利于构建、共享和重用。该文从当前的研究和应用需求出发,给出一个强调论域的本体定义,是完善本体逻辑理论的基础。总结已有的研究成果,基于统一本体层次化和模块化的思想,提出子本体、原子本体以及本体的递归定义,为本体建立科学的分类体系和一致的逻辑理论打下了基础。     

An ontology change management approach for facility management

Facility management (FM) or technical property management is an approach to operate, maintain, improve and adapt buildings and infrastructures of organizations. A FM project requires the cooperation of many actors from different domains so it has to be automated in a constrained collaborative environment. This paper proposes a new approach for ontology change management applied on facility management of such projects. The industrial challenge is, firstly, to ensure consistency of a FM project knowledge from the construction phase to the technical property management phase (after delivery). Secondly, it has to provide to each actor of the project a personal up-to-date “view” of the building knowledge related to its business profile and allow its evolution. The scientific approach, called OntoVersionGraph, is a change management methodology for managing ontology life cycle including ontology evolution and versioning features, in conjunction with contextual view modeling. Its contribution is the impact management of changes between the ontology and its different views.     

Extending the Unified Modeling Language for ontology development

There is rapidly growing momentum for web enabled agents that reason about and dynamically integrate the appropriate knowledge and services at run-time. The dynamic integration of knowledge and services depends on the existence of explicit declarative semantic models (ontologies). We have been building tools for ontology development based on the Unified Modeling Language (UML). This allows the many mature UML tools, models and expertise to be applied to knowledge representation systems, not only for visualizing complex ontologies but also for managing the ontology development process. UML has many features, such as profiles, global modularity and extension mechanisms that are not generally available in most ontology languages. However, ontology languages have some features that UML does not support. Our paper identifies the similarities and differences (with examples) between UML and the ontology languages RDF and DAML+OIL. To reconcile these differences, we propose a modification to the UML metamodel to address some of the most problematic differences. One of these is the ontological concept variously called a property, relation or predicate. This notion corresponds to the UML concepts of association and attribute. In ontology languages properties are first-class modeling elements, but UML associations and attributes are not first-class. Our proposal is backward-compatible with existing UML models while enhancing its viability for ontology modeling. While we have focused on RDF and DAML+OIL in our research and development activities, the same issues apply to many of the knowledge representation languages. This is especially the case for semantic network and concept graph approaches to knowledge representations. Initial sbmission: 16 February 2002 / Revised submission: 15 October 2002 Published online: 2 December 2002     

基于本体的工作流知识管理系统的应用研究

知识管理已成为企业在信息化条件下提高竞争力的必要手段,工作流系统是支持工作流定义、执行和监控的计算机软件系统.针时工作流系统应用在企业知识管理时面临的流程数据整合不易、文件内容词汇关系的不明确与存取控制不便等问题,提出了一种基于本体的工作流知识管理系统架构,并介绍了其设计及实现机制.该系统以XML作为流程文件交换与存储格式,利用本体论的方法将不同知识领域所包含的概念及关联特性整合进工作流程中,并设计了基于角色继承的授权管理机制进行精确的文件存取控制.     

Using BWW model to evaluate building ontologies in CGs formalism

The Bunge–Wand–Weber (BWW) representation model defines ontological constructs for information systems. According to these constructs the completeness and efficiency of a modeling technique can be defined. Ontology plays an essential role in e-commerce. Using or updating an existing ontology and providing tools to solve any semantic conflicts become essential steps before putting a system online. We use conceptual graphs (CGs) to implement ontologies. This paper evaluates CG capabilities using the BWW representation model. It finds out that CGs are ontologically complete according to Wand and Weber definition. Also it finds out that CGs have construct overload and construct redundancy which can undermine the ontological clarity of CGs. This leads us to build a meta-model to avoid some ontological-unclarity problems. We use some of the BWW constructs to build the meta-model.     

Development of a peer-to-peer information sharing system using ontologies

Most existing agent-oriented methodologies ignore system extensibility, interoperability and reusability issues. Ontologies have been found to play a significant role in facilitating interoperability, reusability, MAS development activities (including MAS analysis and agent knowledge modeling) and MAS run-time operation (including agent communication and reasoning). However, most of the existing AOSE methodologies do not provide support for ontology-based MAS development. We present software engineering requirements for ontology-based development for MAS and examine an existing methodology, MOBMAS – a “Methodology for Ontology-Based MASs”, which makes use of ontologies as a modeling tool. In this examination, we highlight how MOBMAS can be extended to utilizing ontology roles in facilitating interoperability, reusability and verification. This will be based on using MOBMAS to develop peer-to-peer (P2P) community-based information sharing application which lead us to identify ontology related steps that can be added to enhance MOBMAS. MOBMAS is used by two experienced software developers who were not authors of the methodology, to guide the development of the P2P application.     

基于Ontology的工作流知识管理系统的应用研究

知识管理已成为企业在信息化条件下提高竞争力的必要手段,工作流系统是支持工作流定义、执行和监控的计算机软件系统。针对工作流系统应用在企业知识管理时面临的流程数据整合不易、文件内容词汇关系的不明确与存取控制不便等问题,提出了一种基于本体的工作流知识管理系统架构,并介绍了其设计及实现机制。该系统以XML作为流程文件交换与存储格式,流程中的知识可以结构化地保存下来,便于在各部门的异质系统间传递;并利用了本体论的方法将企业内的组织、计划、人员等不同知识领域所包含的概念及关联特性整合进工作流程中,改善了部门间的语意差异,更好地实现了工作流中知识的应用效率与一致性。     

New perspectives in ontological analysis: Guidelines and rules for incorporating modelling languages into UEML

Ontological analysis of modelling languages has been mainly used for evaluating quality of modelling language w.r.t. one specific upper ontology. Generally speaking this evaluation has been done by identifying the coverage of the modelling language constructs w.r.t. the ontology and vice-versa. However, a quite limited support has been developed for performing the ontological analysis task. Specifically, various ontologies used for ontological analysis are not associated to a machine readable format; the coverage of modelling language constructs is mostly provided by informal tables mapping one construct on to one ontological concept; the way in which this coverage task is undertaken is poorly specified (resulting in distinct results for distinct experts involved), and finally, preventing any ontology enrichment for dealing with some specialised language constructs. This limited support also prevents application of ontological analysis outcomes to problems and domains dealing with interoperability, integration and integrated usage of enterprise and IS models, which is today one of the key aspects for making interoperable, maintainable and evolvable inter and intra enterprise software systems. The paper provides an overview of the Unified Enterprise Modelling Language (UEML) approach, which introduces advanced support to ontological analysis of modelling languages. The paper is specifically focused on the task of ontological analysis of modelling languages (named incorporation of modelling languages) by introducing and explaining several guidelines and rules for driving the task: therefore, not all the aspects of the UEML approach will be discussed through the paper. The guidelines and rules are illustrated by incorporation of three selected modelling constructs from IDEF3, a well known language for specifying enterprise processes.     

Using OWL-VisMod through a decision-making process for reusing OWL ontologies

Knowledge representation (KR) can be defined as a set of ontological commitments, provided with the capabilities of performing inference. The knowledge can be represented using an ontology, which provides a shared insight into a certain domain. The use of ontologies to represent knowledge also allows interoperation among knowledge-based systems. The process of building ontologies can be tedious and sometimes exhaustive. A possible solution in order to avoid this problem would be to reuse the ontologies previously created by others. This paper describes a case study of reusability using OWL-VisMod, a tool designed for developing ontological engineering based on visual conceptual modelling for OWL ontologies. A workflow performed with OWL-VisMod is described; including a decision-making process in order to decide whether or not it could be desirable to reuse an ontology, according to the requirements of a certain project.     

教育测评知识图谱的构建及其表示学习

知识图谱旨在描述现实世界中存在的实体以及实体之间的关系.自2012年谷歌提出“Google Knowledge Graph”以来，知识图谱在学术界和工业界受到广泛关注.针对教育领域中信息缺乏系统性组织的不足，本文构建了面向高中的教育测评知识图谱（Educational Assessment Knowledge Graph，EAKG），其中EAKG的构建包括基于本体技术的知识图谱模式层构建和依托于模式层结构的知识图谱数据层构建.与传统通过网页爬虫等技术手段构建的知识图谱相比，本文构建的知识图谱优点在于逻辑结构清晰，实体间关系的刻画遵循知识图谱模式层的定义.EAKG为领域内知识共享，知识推理，知识表示学习等任务提供了良好的支撑.在真实模考数据上的实验结果表明：在试卷得分预测，知识点得分预测的实体链接预测和三元组分类嵌入式表示学习任务上，引入领域本体作为模式层构建的EAKG的性能优于没有领域本体模式层单纯由数据事实构成的EAKG，实验表明，领域本体的引入对知识图谱的表示学习具有一定的指导意义.