Semantic Web -

Ontologies
Sameer Totey
 What is Ontology
■ Branch of Philosophy that studies
nature of existence
■ Specification of a conceptualization
■ Document or file that formally
defines relations among terms
■ Shared understanding of some
domain of interest

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 What is Ontology for
Web ?
■ A Taxonomy which defines
classes of objects and relations
among them
■ A set of inference rules
■ (Classes subclasses and relations
among entities)

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 Why Ontologies?

■ Lack of a shared understanding

leads to poor communication
■ Disparate modeling paradigms,
languages and software tools
limit
1. Interoperability
2. Knowledge Sharing and reuse

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 Theory
■ Usually Ontology structure is represented as a 5
Tuple O = (C,R, H, rel, A)
■ Disjoint Sets C and R are concept identifiers and
relation identifiers respectively
■ H is the concept hierarchy. Also called Taxonomy.
H(C1,C2) means C1 is subconcept of C2. H is a
directed transitive relation.
■ Rel is a function that relates concept non-
taxonomically, rel : R C X C
■ A is a set of ontology Axioms, expressed in an logical
language like first order logic.

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 Ontology Engineering
■ The task of developing an
ontology is a typical knowledge
acquisition task involving
1. Kickoff
2. Refinement
3. Evaluation
4. Maintenance

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 Languages
■ There are several representation languages in the AI
(machine learning, natural language processing, knowledge
representation etc) community based on FOL like
■ Frame Logic
■ Loom
■ Ontololingua etc.

■ Web needs XML based language : defining a

language on top of XML syntax
■ SHOE (SHOE is an HTML-based knowledge representation language)
Simple HTML Ontology Extention.
■ XOL (Ontology Exchange Language)
■ OML (Ontology markup language)
■ RDFS (Resourse description framework scheme language)
■ OIL (Ontology Interchange Language)

■ DAML (DARPA Agent markup language)

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 Editors
■ Tools that help create ontologies
and metadata that can be used by
multiple agents:
◆ Protégé
◆ WebOnto
◆ OilEd
◆ ONTOEdit

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 Related issues:
■ Higher order logic based inference
engines – Needed but not feasible
■ First order logic based inference
engines – feasible but limited expressive
power, FOL is semi-decidable some
inferences are computationally
intractable
■ Interoperability
◆ Bremer Semantic Translation project
◆ SKC (Stanford Scalable Knowledge
Composition) project
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 References
■ http://www.fzi.de/wim
[Development and applications
of Ontologies] tutorial
■ www.sematicweb.org
■ www.ontologyworks.com

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