A translation approach to portable ontology specifications

‘The Production of Space’, in: Frans Jacobi, Imagine, Space Poetry, Copenhagen, 1996, unpaginated.

The Production of Space

Recent work in Artificial Intelligence is exploring the use of formal ontologies as a way of specifying content-specific agreements for the sharing and reuse of knowledge among software entities. We take an engineering perspective on the development of such ontologies. Formal ontologies are viewed as designed artifacts, formulated for specific purposes and evaluated against objective design criteria. We describe the role of ontologies in supporting knowledge sharing activities, and then present a set of criteria to guide the development of ontologies for these purposes. We show how these criteria are applied in case studies from the design of ontologies for engineering mathematics and bibliographic data. Selected design decisions are discussed, and alternative representation choices and evaluated against the design criteria.

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Toward principles for the design of ontologies used for knowledge sharing

物件導向軟體之架構(Object-Oriented Software Construction)探討

This paper is intended to serve as a comprehensive introduction to the emerging field concerned with the design and use of ontologies. We observe that disparate backgrounds, languages, tools and techniques are a major barrier to effective communication among people, organisations and/or software understanding (i.e. an “ontology”) in a given subject area, can improve such communication, which in turn, can give rise to greater reuse and sharing, inter-operability, and more reliable software. After motivating their need, we clarify just what ontologies are and what purpose they serve. We outline a methodology for developing and evaluating ontologies, first discussing informal techniques, concerning such issues as scoping, handling ambiguity, reaching agreement and producing definitions. We then consider the benefits and describe, a more formal approach. We re-visit the scoping phase, and discuss the role of formal languages and techniques in the specification, implementation and evalution of ontologies. Finally, we review the state of the art and practice in this emerging field, considering various case studies, software tools for ontology development, key research issues and future prospects.

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Ontologies: principles, methods and applications

Over the last several years, services science has emerged as an effective means to understand services and the socio-technical systems in which they are deployed. This systemic view requires a genuinely interdisciplinary approach to the study of services. In this chapter, we review a number of significant approaches to analyze, understand and model service systems, with an emphasis on showing similarities and differences that highlight the many aspects of a rich service ecosystem. The goal of this chapter is to provide developers with an overall perspective on such rich service system models, as a basis for choosing those which mostly fit their own needs.

Service System Approaches

. When we describe the shape of certain entities, like a vase or a river, we refer to their qualities in different ways. A river has usually a definite length, but its width varies with the distance from the source, typically getting higher towards the end. Similarly, a vase has a definite height, but its width may vary, reflecting a certain pattern that often marks a particular style. So, at least for certain entities, quality kinds such as length, height and width don’t behave in the same way: length or height just inhere to these objects with no need of further qualification, while width requires a spatial localization in order to be determined. In this paper I would like to explore the way qualities of things behave with respect to the parts of such things. Building on the notion of individual quality introduced in the DOLCE ontology, I will introduce the new notions of local quality, quality field and quality pattern, stressing their cognitive role in many practical situations. I will argue that an expression like “the river’s width” or “the depth of the sea” actually refers to a quality field, and not to an individual quality. Quality fields will be used to introduce the further notion of quality pattern, and to analyze the distinction between variation and change. When we describe the shape of certain entities, like a vase or a river, we refer to their qualities in different ways. A river has usually a definite length, but its width varies with the distance from the source, typically getting higher towards the end. Similarly, a vase has a definite height, but its width may vary, reflecting a certain pattern that often marks a particular style. So, at least for certain entities, quality kinds such as length, height and width don’t behave in the same way: length or height just inhere to these objects with no need of further qualification, while width requires a spatial localization in order to be determined. In this paper I would like to explore the way qualities of things behave with respect to the parts of such things. Building on the notion of individual quality introduced in the DOLCE ontology, I will introduce the new notions of local quality, quality field and quality pattern, stressing their cognitive role in many practical situations. I will argue that an expression like “the river’s width” or “the depth of the sea” actually refers to a quality field, and not to an individual quality. Quality fields will be used to introduce the further notion of quality pattern, and to analyze the distinction between variation and change.

/pdf/local-qualities-quality-fields-and-quality-patterns-a-3rdlbadtca.pdf

Local Qualities, Quality Fields, and Quality Patterns: A Preliminary Investigation.

Cloud services (CCS) are a crucial element in the service sector, but there are still challenges left in their design, implementation, operation and dismissal, due to issues such as the integration of physical and technical components, interaction of social and technical aspects, dynamic and elastic reconfiguration. In modelling service systems, ontologies have been recognized as a useful instrument for reducing conceptual ambiguities and inconsistencies. However, none of the general approaches proposed in literature have addressed the specific aspects of CCS. In this perspective, we explore how the UFO-S core ontology can be used to describe IT services and, in particular, CCS. A case study and the challenges deriving by CCS are discussed.

/pdf/ontology-based-modeling-of-cloud-services-challenges-and-chyi41xpea.pdf

Ontology-based Modeling of Cloud Services: Challenges and Perspectives.

Ontologies and semantic interoperability

The upper-level taxonomic structure of current ontologies is often quite complicated and hard to understand In this paper I analyze the ontological nature of upper-level categories, considering the necessity of splitting them according to more subtle distinctions or the opportunity of excluding them because of their limited organizational role

Nicola Guarino

Papers

Service System Approaches

Local Qualities, Quality Fields, and Quality Patterns: A Preliminary Investigation.

Ontology-based Modeling of Cloud Services: Challenges and Perspectives.

Ontologies and semantic interoperability

Avoiding IS-A overloading: the role of identity conditions in ontology design