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

1. Introduction In previous work, Ferrario and Guarino have proposed an ontological analysis of the notion of service based on the notion of commitment In this approach, a service is understood as a complex process, consisting of several activities going on more or less in parallel, all dependent on a persisting state of generic commitment. More recently , in the framework of a cooperation project involving both LOA and NEMO, such approach has been revised and extended as a specialisation of the UFO ontology (Van Sinderen, et al., 2013). In this work, on one hand, the crucial notion of commitment is complemented by the dual notion of claim, capturing in this way the fundamental relational (contractual) nature of services; on the other hand, both commitments and claims are not understood as states of objects (namely, mental states of service providers or clients), but rather as objects in their own right, although specifically dependent, respectively, on providers or clients. In this new view, at the core of the notion of service there is a reified relationship between a service provider and a (potential) community of customers, which is understood as a bundle of commitments and claims. Following (Guizzardi, 2005), these rei-fied relationships are called relators in the UFO ontology. Note that this new approach does not reject commitment (or claim) states, but simply allows us to point at what these states are about, after all: specific mental attitudes of people or organizations. Most importantly, it allows for modeling the dynamics of service relationships, focusing on the subjects of change within such relationships: commitments and claims. Modeling service dynamics is especially important from the point of view of service contract management (Bochicchio, Longo, & Mansueto, 2011). Indeed, especially for IT services, service contract conditions may be seen as a formalized description of commitments and claims, defined in the service model. They evolve in time during the whole service provision cycle, crucially depending on service level monitoring and management issues. As ITIL's Continual Service Improvement (CSI) (Case, 2007) states, service terms, or provider's obligations and penalties, can be defined after a monitoring phase when real values of SLAs' KPIs are available, and monitoring procedures have been agreed between service providers and service clients.

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Modeling Service Dynamics: a Case Study.

On the Reification of Relationships.

Sommario L'ontologia – “lo studio dell'essere in quanto essere”, scriveva Aristotele – nasce ed è usualmente concepita come una disciplina strettamente filosofica, lontana dal mondo della tecnologia. Negli ultimi anni, tuttavia, l'esplosione delle comunicazioni in rete ha favorito un nuovo fenomeno: gli aspetti ontologici dell'informazione hanno acquistato un crescente valore strategico. Mediante una caratterizzazione ontologica dell’informazione, infatti, questa può essere reperita, isolata, organizzata e integrata in base a ciò che più conta: il suo contenuto. Questo breve articolo si propone di presentare in modo informale un aspetto fondamentale delle ricerche in questo campo, legato al problema della disambiguazione del significato.

Negoziati di significato

A Mini-Description of the ITL System

After a brief introduction on the necessity of an explicit domain description for logic knowledge bases and the advantages of many-sorted logics, we argue that domain representation may consist of a separate logic theory which allows sorts to be assigned and tested dynamically. Then we show how this theory may be used by a meta-interpreter to implement many-sorted unification. Moreover we introduce a way for structuring the domain of discourse in a semantic network, leading to a system where domain knowledge and object language assertions are conceptually distinguished but embedded within an homogeneous formalism, which we call DRL (Declarative Representation Language). We call the former terminologic knowledge and the latter assertional knowledge, showing how some of the ideas of knowledge representation systems like KRYPTON can be successfully introduced within a logic programming approach.

Nicola Guarino

Papers

Modeling Service Dynamics: a Case Study.

On the Reification of Relationships.

Negoziati di significato

A Mini-Description of the ITL System

Representing Domain Structure of Many-Sorted Prolog Knowledge Bases.