Semantic Web -

Ontologies
Sameer Totey

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 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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 Acrobat Document

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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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