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.

/pdf/toward-principles-for-the-design-of-ontologies-used-for-1laaojmx6x.pdf

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.

/pdf/ontologies-principles-methods-and-applications-13omx3se4e.pdf

Ontologies: principles, methods and applications

The philosophical discipline of Ontology is evolving towards an engineering discipline, and in this evolution the need for a principled methodology has clearly arisen. In this paper, we briefly discuss our recent work towards developing a methodology for ontology-based model engineering. This methodology builds on previous methodology efforts, and is founded on important analytic notions that have been drawn from Philosophy and adapted to Engineering: identity, unity, rigidity, and dependence. We demonstrate how these techniques can be used to analyze properties, which clarifies many misconceptions about taxonomies and helps bring substantial order to ontologies.

Towards a methodology for ontology based model engineering

In this paper we propose an analysis and a rearrangement of WordNet's top-level taxonomy of nouns. We briefly review WordNet and identify its main semantic limitations, in the light of the ontology evaluation principles lying at the core of the OntoClean methodology. Then we briefly present a first version of the OntoClean Top (OCT) ontology, and show how WordNet can be aligned with it. The result is a “cleaned-up” WordNet, which is meant to be conceptually more rigorous, cognitively transparent, and efficiently exploitable in several applications.

/pdf/restructuring-wordnet-s-top-level-the-ontoclean-approach-50uj66pbyg.pdf

Restructuring WordNet's Top-Level: The OntoClean approach

In this paper we propose an analysis and an upgrade of WordNet's top-level synset taxonomy. We briefly review WordNet and identify its main semantic limitations. Some principles from a forthcoming OntoClean methodology are applied to the ontological analysis of WordNet. A revised top-level taxonomy is proposed, which is meant to be more conceptually rigorous, cognitively transparent, and efficiently exploitable in several applications.

/pdf/conceptual-analysis-of-lexical-taxonomies-the-case-of-4bfjme1p2h.pdf

Conceptual analysis of lexical taxonomies: the case of WordNet top-level

Formalizing the ontological commitment of a logical language means offering a way to specify the intended meaning of its vocabulary by constraining the set of its models, giving explicit information about the intended nature of the modelling primitives and their a priori relationships. We present here a formal definition of ontological commitment which aims to capture the very basic ontological assumptions about the intended domain, related to issues such as identity and internal structure. To tackle such issues, a modal framework endowed with mereo-topological primitives has been adopted. The paper is mostly based on a re-visitation of philosophical (and linguistic) literature in the perspective of knowledge representation.

/pdf/formalizing-ontological-commitments-3orsx9lw6t.pdf

Formalizing ontological commitments

The Workshop on Term Subsumption Languages in Knowledge Representation was held 18-20 October 1989 at the Inn at Thorn Hill, located in the White Mountain region of New Hampshire.

Nicola Guarino

Papers

Towards a methodology for ontology based model engineering

Restructuring WordNet's Top-Level: The OntoClean approach

Conceptual analysis of lexical taxonomies: the case of WordNet top-level

Formalizing ontological commitments

Term Subsumption Languages in Knowledge Representation