Knowledge Acquisition, Modeling and Management 

About: Knowledge Acquisition, Modeling and Management is an academic conference. The conference publishes majorly in the area(s): Ontology (information science) & Knowledge acquisition. Over the lifetime, 594 publications have been published by the conference receiving 17054 citations.

Sweetening Ontologies with DOLCE

Abstract: In this paper we introduce the DOLCE upper level ontology, the first module of a Foundational Ontologies Library being developed within the WonderWeb project. DOLCE is presented here in an intuitive way; the reader should refer to the project deliverable for a detailed axiomatization. A comparison with WordNet's top-level taxonomy of nouns is also provided, which shows how DOLCE, used in addition to the OntoClean methodology, helps isolating and understanding some major WordNet?s semantic limitations. We suggest that such analysis could hopefully lead to an ?ontologically sweetened? WordNet, meant to be conceptually more rigorous, cognitively transparent, and efficiently exploitable in several applications.

Measuring Similarity between Ontologies

Abstract: Ontologies now play an important role for many knowledge-intensive applications for which they provide a source of precisely defined terms However, with their wide-spread usage there come problems concerning their proliferation Ontology engineers or users frequently have a core ontology that they use, eg, for browsing or querying data, but they need to extend it with, adapt it to, or compare it with the large set of other ontologies For the task of detecting and retrieving relevant ontologies, one needs means for measuring the similarity between ontologies We present a set of ontology similarity measures and a multiple-phase empirical evaluation

The Knowledge Model of Protégé-2000: Combining Interoperability and Flexibility

Abstract: Knowledge-based systems have become ubiquitous in recent years. Knowledge-base developers need to be able to share and reuse knowledge bases that they build. Therefore, interoperability among different knowledge-representation systems is essential. The Open Knowledge-Base Connectivity protocol (OKBC) is a common query and construction interface for frame-based systems that facilitates this interoperability. ProtEgE-2000 is an OKBC-compatible knowledge-base-editing environment developed in our laboratory. We describe ProtEgE-2000 knowledge model that makes the import and export of knowledge bases from and to other knowledge-base servers easy. We discuss how the requirements of being a usable and configurable knowledge-acquisition tool affected our decisions in the knowledge-model design. ProtEgE-2000 also has a flexible metaclass architecture which provides configurable templates for new classes in the knowledge base. The use of metaclasses makes ProtEgE-2000 easily extensible and enables its use with other knowledge models. We demonstrate that we can resolve many of the differences between the knowledge models of ProtEgE-2000 and Resource Description Framework (RDF)--a system for annotating Web pages with knowledge elements--by defining a new metaclass set. Resolving the differences between the knowledge models in declarative way enables easy adaptation of ProtEgE-2000 as an editor for other knowledge-representation systems.

OIL in a Nutshell

Abstract: Currently computers are changing from single isolated devices into entry points into a worldwide network of information exchange and business transactions. Support in data, information, and knowledge exchange is becoming the key issue in current computer technology. Ontologies will play a major role in supporting information exchange processes in various areas. A prerequisite for such a role is the development of a joint standard for specifying and exchanging ontologies. The purpose of the paper is precisely concerned with this necessity. We will present OIL, which is a proposal for such a standard. It is based on existing proposals such as OKBC, XOL and RDF schema, enriching them with necessary features for expressing ontologies. The paper sketches the main ideas of OIL.

A Formal Ontology of Properties

Abstract: A common problem of ontologies is that their taxonomic structure is often poor and confusing. This is typically exemplified by the unrestrained use of subsumption to accomplish a variety of tasks. In this paper we show how a formal ontology of unary properties can help using the subsumption relation in a disciplined way. This formal ontology is based on some meta-properties built around the fundamental philosophical notions of identity, unity, essence, and dependence. These meta-properties impose some constraints on the subsumption relation that clarify many misconceptions about taxonomies, facilitating their understanding, comparison and integration.