Upper ontology

About: Upper ontology is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 9767 publications have been published within this topic receiving 220721 citations. The topic is also known as: top-level ontology & foundation ontology.

Using the semantic web as background knowledge for ontology mapping

Abstract: While current approaches to ontology mapping produce good results by mainly relying on label and structure based similarity measures, there are several cases in which they fail to discover important mappings. In this paper we describe a novel approach to ontology mapping, which is able to avoid this limitation by using background knowledge. Existing approaches relying on background knowledge typically have one or both of two key limitations: 1) they rely on a manually selected reference ontology; 2) they suffer from the noise introduced by the use of semi-structured sources, such as text corpora. Our technique circumvents these limitations by exploiting the increasing amount of semantic resources available online. As a result, there is no need either for a manually selected reference ontology (the relevant ontologies are dynamically selected from an online ontology repository), or for transforming background knowledge in an ontological form. The promising results from experiments on two real life thesauri indicate both that our approach has a high precision and also that it can find mappings, which are typically missed by existing approaches.

Modelling Ontology Evaluation and Validation

Abstract: We present a comprehensive approach to ontology evaluation and validation, which have become a crucial problem for the development of semantic technologies. Existing evaluation methods are integrated into one sigle framework by means of a formal model. This model consists, firstly, of a meta-ontology called O 2 , that characterises ontologies as semiotic objects. Based on O 2 and an analysis of existing methodologies, we identify three main types of measures for evaluation: structural measures, that are typical of ontologies represented as graphs; functional measures, that are related to the intended use of an ontology and of its components; and usability-profiling measures, that depend on the level of annotation of the considered ontology. The meta-ontology is then complemented with an ontology of ontology validation called oQual, which provides the means to devise the best set of criteria for choosing an ontology over others in the context of a given project. Finally, we provide a small example of how to apply oQual-derived criteria to a validation case.

A fuzzy ontology for semantic modelling and recognition of human behaviour

Abstract: We propose a fuzzy ontology for human activity representation, which allows us to model and reason about vague, incomplete, and uncertain knowledge. Some relevant subdomains found to be missing in previous proposed ontologies for this domain were modelled as well. The resulting fuzzy OWL 2 ontology is able to model uncertain knowledge and represent temporal relationships between activities using an underlying fuzzy state machine representation. We provide a proof of concept of the approach in work scenarios such as the office domain, and also make experiments to emphasize the benefits of our approach with respect to crisp ontologies. As a result, we demonstrate that the inclusion of fuzzy concepts and relations in the ontology provide benefits during the recognition process with respect to crisp approaches.

Ontology Engineering --- The DOGMA Approach

Abstract: This chapter presents a methodological framework for ontology engineering (called DOGMA), which is aimed to guide ontology builders towards building ontologies that are both highly reusable and usable, easier to build and to maintain. We survey the main foundational challenges in ontology engineering and analyse to what extent one can build an ontology independently of application requirements at hand. We discuss ontology reusability verses ontology usability and present the DOGMA approach, its philosophy and formalization, which prescribe that an ontology be built as separate domain axiomatization and application axiomatizations. While a domain axiomatization focuses on the characterization of the intended meaning (i.e. intended models) of a vocabulary at the domain level, application axiomatizations focus on the usability of this vocabulary according to certain application/usability perspectives and specify the legal models (a subset of the intended models) of the application(s)' interest. We show how specification languages (such as ORM, UML, EER, and OWL) can be effectively (re)used in ontology engineering.