Towards a systematic benchmarking of ontology-based query rewriting systems

Query rewriting is one of the fundamental steps in ontologybased data access (OBDA) approaches. It takes as inputs an ontology and a query written according to that ontology, and produces as an output a set of queries that should be evaluated to account for the inferences that should be considered for that query and ontology. Different query rewriting systems give support to different ontology languages with varying expressiveness, and the rewritten queries obtained as an output do also vary in expressiveness. This heterogeneity has traditionally made it difficult to compare different approaches, and the area lacks in general commonly agreed benchmarks that could be used not only for such comparisons but also for improving OBDA support. In this paper we compile data, dimensions and measurements that have been used to evaluate some of the most recent systems, we analyse and characterise these assets, and provide a unified set of them that could be used as a starting point towards a more systematic benchmarking process for such systems. Finally, we apply this initial benchmark with some of the most relevant OBDA approaches in the state of the art.

Towards a Systematic benchmarking of ontology-based query rewriting systems

Query rewriting is one of the fundamental steps in ontologybased data access (OBDA) approaches. It takes as inputs an ontology and a query written according to that ontology, and produces as an output a set of queries that should be evaluated to account for the inferences that should be considered for that query and ontology. Different query rewriting systems give support to different ontology languages with varying expressiveness, and the rewritten queries obtained as an output do also vary in expressiveness. This heterogeneity has traditionally made it difficult to compare different approaches, and the area lacks in general commonly agreed benchmarks that could be used not only for such comparisons but also for improving OBDA support. In this paper we compile data, dimensions and measurements that have been used to evaluate some of the most recent systems, we analyse and characterise these assets, and provide a unified set of them that could be used as a starting point towards a more systematic benchmarking process for such systems. Finally, we apply this initial benchmark with some of the most relevant OBDA approaches in the state of the art.

Combining open and closed world reasoning for the semantic web

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Doutor em Informática

BioSWR - Semantic Web services Registry for Bioinformatics

Article About the Authors Metrics Comments Related Content Abstract Introduction Functionality Implementation Discussion Acknowledgments Author Contributions References Reader Comments (0) Figures Abstract Despite of the variety of available Web services registries specially aimed at Life Sciences, their scope is usually restricted to a limited set of well-defined types of services. While dedicated registries are generally tied to a particular format, general-purpose ones are more adherent to standards and usually rely on Web Service Definition Language (WSDL). Although WSDL is quite flexible to support common Web services types, its lack of semantic expressiveness led to various initiatives to describe Web services via ontology languages. Nevertheless, WSDL 2.0 descriptions gained a standard representation based on Web Ontology Language (OWL). BioSWR is a novel Web services registry that provides standard Resource Description Framework (RDF) based Web services descriptions along with the traditional WSDL based ones. The registry provides Web-based interface for Web services registration, querying and annotation, and is also accessible programmatically via Representational State Transfer (REST) API or using a SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language. BioSWR server is located at http://inb.bsc.es/BioSWR/and its code is available at https://sourceforge.net/projects/bioswr/​under the LGPL license.

AutoWebS: um Ambiente para Modelagem e Geração Automática de ServiçosWeb Semânticos

Typically Web services contain only syntactic information that describes their interfaces. Due to the lack of semantic descriptions of the Web services, service composition becomes a difficult task. To solve this problem, Web services can exploit the use of ontologies for the semantic definition of service s interface, thus facilitating the automation of discovering, publication, mediation, invocation, and composition of services. However, ontology languages, such as OWL-S, have constructs that are not easy to understand, even for Web developers, and the existing tools that support their use contains many details that make them difficult to manipulate. This paper presents a MDD tool called AutoWebS (Automatic Generation of Semantic Web Services) to develop OWL-S semantic Web services. AutoWebS uses an approach based on UML profiles and model transformations for automatic generation of Web services and their semantic description. AutoWebS offers an environment that provides many features required to model, implement, compile, and deploy semantic Web services

Ontological evaluation of enterprise systems interoperability using ebXML

Enterprise systems interoperability (ESI) is an important topic for business currently. This situation is evidenced, at least in part, by the number and extent of potential candidate protocols for such process interoperation, viz., ebXML, BPML, BPEL, and WSCI. Wide-ranging support for each of these candidate standards already exists. However, despite broad acceptance, a sound theoretical evaluation of these approaches has not yet been provided. We use the Bunge-Wand-Weber (BWW) models, in particular, the representation model, to provide the basis for such a theoretical evaluation. We, and other researchers, have shown the usefulness of the representation model for analyzing, evaluating, and engineering techniques in the areas of traditional and structured systems analysis, object-oriented modeling, and process modeling. In this work, we address the question, what are the potential semantic weaknesses of using ebXML alone for process interoperation between enterprise systems? We find that users will lack important implementation information because of representational deficiencies; due to ontological redundancy, the complexity of the specification is unnecessarily increased; and, users of the specification will have to bring in extra-model knowledge to understand constructs in the specification due to instances of ontological excess.

Universal ontology: attentive tracking of objects and substances across languages and over development

Previous research has demonstrated that adults are successful at visually tracking rigidly moving items, but experience great difficulties when tracking substance-like ‘‘pouring’’ items. Using a comparative approach, we investigated whether the presence/absence of the grammatical count–mass distinction influences adults and children’s ability to attentively track objects versus substances. More specifically, we aimed to explore whether the higher success at tracking rigid over substance-like items appears universally or whether speakers of classifier languages (like Japanese, not marking the object–substance distinction) are advantaged at tracking substances as compared to speakers of non-classifier languages (like Swiss German, marking the object–substance distinction). Our results supported the idea that language has no effect on low-level cognitive processes such as the attentive visual processing of objects and substances. We concluded arguing that the tendency to prioritize objects is universal and independent of specific characteristics of the language spoken.

Essentials in Ontology Engineering: Methodologies, Languages, and Tools

In the beginning of the 90s, ontology development was similar to an art: ontology developers did not have clear guidelines on how to build ontologies but only some design criteria to be followed. Work on principles, methods and methodologies, together with supporting technologies and languages, made ontology development become an engineering discipline, the so-called Ontology Engineering. Ontology Engineering refers to the set of activities that concern the ontology development process and the ontology life cycle, the methods and methodologies for building ontologies, and the tool suites and languages that support them. Thanks to the work done in the Ontology Engineering field, the development of ontologies within and between teams has increased and improved, as well as the possibility of reusing ontologies in other developments and in final applications. Currently, ontologies are widely used in (a) Knowledge Engineering, Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science, (b) applications related to knowledge management, natural language processing, e-commerce, intelligent information integration, information retrieval, database design and integration, bio-informatics, education, and (c) the Semantic Web, the Semantic Grid, and the Linked Data initiative. In this paper, we provide an overview of Ontology Engineering, mentioning the most outstanding and used methodologies, languages, and tools for building ontologies. In addition, we include some words on how all these elements can be used in the Linked Data initiative.

Representing organizational structures in enterprise architecture : an ontology-based approach

Arquitetura Corporativa promove o estabelecimento de uma visão holística da estrutura e forma de trabalho de uma organização. Um dos aspectos abordados em Arquitetura Corporativa está associada a "estrutura ativa" da organização, que diz respeito a “quem" realiza as atividades organizacionais. Várias abordagens têm sido propostas a fim de proporcionar um meio para a representação de Arquitetura Corporativa, entre as quais ARIS, RM-ODP, UPDM e ArchiMate. Apesar da aceitação por parte da comunidade, as abordagens existentes se concentram em propósitos diferentes, têm limitações de escopo e algumas não têm semântica de mundo real bem definida. Além das abordagens de modelagem, muitas abordagens de ontologias têm sido propostas, a fim de descrever o domínio de estrutura ativa, incluindo as ontologias de SUPER Project, TOVE, Enterprise Ontology e W3C Org Ontology. Embora especificadas para fundamentação semântica e negociação de significado, algumas das abordagens propostas têm fins específicos e cobertura limitada. Além disso, algumas das abordagens não são definidas usando linguagens formais e outras são especificadas usando linguagens sem semântica bem definida. Este trabalho apresenta uma ontologia de referência bem fundamentada para o domínio organizacional. A ontologia organizacional de referência apresentada abrange os aspectos básicos discutidos na literatura organizacional, tais como divisão do trabalho, relações sociais e classificação das unidades estruturais. Além disso, também abrange os aspectos organizacionais definidos em abordagens existentes, levando em consideração tanto abordagens de modelagem quanto abordagens ontológicas. A ontologia resultante é especificada em OntoUML e estende os conceitos sociais de UFO-C.

An ontology roadmap for crowdsourcing innovation intermediaries

Ontologies have proliferated in the last years, essentially justified by the need of achieving a consensus in the multiple representations of reality inside computers, and therefore the accomplishment of interoperability between machines and systems. Ontologies provide an explicit conceptualization that describes the semantics of the data. Crowdsourcing innovation intermediaries are organizations that mediate the communication and relationship between companies that aspire to solve some problem or to take advantage of any business opportunity with a crowd that is prone to give ideas based on their knowledge, experience and wisdom, taking advantage of web 2.0 tools. Various ontologies have emerged, but at the best of our knowledge, there isn’t any ontology that represents the entire process of intermediation of crowdsourcing innovation. In this paper we present an ontology roadmap for developing crowdsourcing innovation ontology of the intermediation process. Over the years, several authors have proposed some distinct methodologies, by different proposals of combining practices, activities, languages, according to the project they were involved in. We start making a literature review on ontology building, and analyse and compare ontologies that propose the development from scratch with the ones that propose reusing other ontologies. We also review enterprise and innovation ontologies known in literature. Finally, are presented the criteria for selecting the methodology and the roadmap for building crowdsourcing innovation intermediary ontology.

Content value chains modelling using a copyright ontology

Existing digital rights management (DRM) systems, initiatives like Creative Commons or research works as some digital rights ontologies provide limited support for content value chains modelling and management. This is becoming a critical issue as content markets start to profit from the possibilities of digital networks and the World Wide Web. The objective is to support the whole copyrighted content value chain across enterprise or business niches boundaries. Our proposal provides a framework that accommodates copyright law and a rich creation model in order to cope with all the creation life cycle stages. The dynamic aspects of value chains are modelled using a hybrid approach that combines ontology-based and rule-based mechanisms. The ontology implementation is based on Web Ontology Language and Description Logic (OWL-DL) reasoners, are directly used for license checking. On the other hand, for more complex aspects of the dynamics of content value chains, rule languages are the choice.

Consistency of UML based designs using ontology reasoners

Software plays an important role in our society and economy. Software development is an intricate process, and it comprises many different tasks: gathering requirements, designing new solutions that fulfill these requirements, as well as implementing these designs using a programming language into a working system. As a consequence, the development of high quality software is a core problem in software engineering. This thesis focuses on the validation of software designs. The issue of the analysis of designs is of great importance, since errors originating from designs may appear in the final system. It is considered economical to rectify the problems as early in the software development process as possible. Practitioners often create and visualize designs using modeling languages, one of the more popular being the Uni ed Modeling Language (UML). The analysis of the designs can be done manually, but in case of large systems, the need of mechanisms that automatically analyze these designs arises. In this thesis, we propose an automatic approach to analyze UML based designs using logic reasoners. This approach firstly proposes the translations of the UML based designs into a language understandable by reasoners in the form of logic facts, and secondly shows how to use the logic reasoners to infer the logical consequences of these logic facts. We have implemented the proposed translations in the form of a tool that can be used with any standard compliant UML modeling tool. Moreover, we authenticate the proposed approach by automatically validating hundreds of UML based designs that consist of thousands of model elements available in an online model repository. The proposed approach is limited in scope, but is fully automatic and does not require any expertise of logic languages from the user. We exemplify the proposed approach with two applications, which include the validation of domain specific languages and the validation of web service interfaces.

OntoMap: an ontology-based architecture to perform the semantic mapping between an interlingua and software components

This paper is about the use of natural language to communicate with computers. Most researches that have pursued this goal consider only requests expressed in English. A way to facilitate the use of several languages in natural language systems is by using an interlingua. An interlingua is an intermediary representation for natural language information that can be processed by machines. We propose to convert natural language requests into an interlingua [universal networking language (UNL)] and to execute these requests using software components. In order to achieve this goal, we propose OntoMap, an ontology-based architecture to perform the semantic mapping between UNL sentences and software components. OntoMap also performs component search and retrieval based on semantic information formalized in ontologies and rules.

The Art of Aidagara: Ethics, Aesthetics, and the Quest for an Ontology of Social Existence in Watsuji Tetsurō’s Rinrigaku

This paper provides an analysis of the key term aidagara (“betweenness”) in the philosophical ethics of Watsuji Tetsurō (1889-1960), in response to and in light of the recent movement in Japanese Buddhist studies known as “Critical Buddhism.” The Critical Buddhist call for a turn away from “topical” or intuitionist thinking and towards (properly Buddhist) “critical” thinking, while problematic in its bipolarity, raises the important issue of the place of “reason” versus “intuition” in Japanese Buddhist ethics. In this paper, a comparison of Watsuji’s “ontological quest” with that of Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), Watsuji’s primary Western source and foil, is followed by an evaluation of a corresponding search for an “ontology of social existence” undertaken by Tanabe Hajime (1885-1962). Ultimately, the philosophico-religious writings of Watsuji Tetsurō allow for the “return” of aesthesis as a modality of social being that is truly dimensionalized, and thus falls prey neither to the verticality of topicalism nor the limiting objectivity of criticalism.

Cross-lingual ontology matching as a challenge for the Multilingual Semantic Web

Recently, the Semantic Web has experienced significant advancements in standards and techniques, as well as in the amount of semantic information available online. Nevertheless, mechanisms are still needed to automatically reconcile information when it is expressed in different natural languages on the Web of Data, in order to improve the access to semantic information across language barriers. In this context several challenges arise [1], such as: (i) ontology translation/localization, (ii) cross-lingual ontology mappings, (iii) representation of multilingual lexical information, and (iv) cross-lingual access and querying of linked data. In the following we will focus on the second challenge, which is the necessity of establishing, representing and storing cross-lingual links among semantic information on the Web. In fact, in a “truly” multilingual Semantic Web, semantic data with lexical representations in one natural language would be mapped to equivalent or related information in other languages, thus making navigation across multilingual information possible for software agents.