Ontologies:
Principles, methods and applications
Uschold, M., Gruninger,
M. 1996 Knowledge Engineering
Review 11 (2), pp. 93-136
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 systems. We show how the development and implementation of an explicit
account of a shared 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 purposes
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 of 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 evaluation 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.
What are
ontologies, and why do we need them?
Chandrasekaran, B., Josephson, J.R., Benjamins, V.R. 1999 IEEE Intelligent
Systems and Their Applications 14 (1), pp. 20-26
This survey
provides a conceptual introduction to ontologies and their role in information
systems and ai. The authors also discuss how
ontologies clarify the domain's structure of knowledge and enable knowledge
sharing.
From SHIQ and RDF to OWL: The making of a Web Ontology Language
Horrocks, I., Patel-Schneider, P.F., Van Harmelen, F. 2003 Web Semantics 1 (1),
pp. 7-26
The OWL Web
Ontology Language is a new formal language for representing ontologies in the
Semantic Web. OWL has features from several families of representation
languages, including primarily Description Logics and frames. OWL also shares
many characteristics with RDF, the W3C base of the Semantic Web. In this paper,
we discuss how the philosophy and features of OWL can be traced back to these
older formalisms, with modifications driven by several other constraints on
OWL. Several interesting problems have arisen where these influences on OWL
have clashed.
Ontology
learning for the semantic web
Maedche, A., Staab, S. 2001 IEEE Intelligent
Systems and Their Applications 16 (2), pp. 72-79
Determining
semantic similarity among entity classes from different ontologies
Rodr’guez, M.A., Egenhofer,
M.J. 2003 IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data
Engineering 15 (2), pp. 442-456
Semantic
similarity measures play an important role In
information retrieval and information integration. Traditional approaches to
modeling semantic similarity compute the semantic distance between definitions
within a single ontology. This single ontology is either a domain-independent
ontology or the result of the integration of existing ontologies. We present an
approach to computing semantic similarity that relaxes the requirement of a
single ontology and accounts for differences in the levels of explicitness and
formalization of the different ontology specifications. A similarity function
determines similar entity classes by using a matching process over synonym
sets, semantic neighborhoods, and distinguishing features that are classified
into parts, functions, and attributes. Experimental results with different
ontologies indicate that the model gives good results when ontologies have
complete and detailed representations of entity classes. While the combination
of word matching and semantic neighborhood matching Is
adequate for detecting equivalent entity classes, feature matching allows us to
discriminate among similar, but not necessarily equivalent entity classes.
Ontology
mapping: The state of the art
Kalfoglou, Y., Schorlemmer, M. 2003 Knowledge Engineering
Review 18 (1), pp. 1-31
Ontology
mapping is seen as a solution provider in today's landscape of ontology
research. As the number of ontologies that are made publicly available and
accessible on the Web increases steadily, so does the need for applications to
use them. A single ontology is no longer enough to support the tasks envisaged
by a distributed environment like the Semantic Web. Multiple ontologies need to
be accessed from several applications. Mapping could provide a common layer
from which several ontologies could be accessed and hence could exchange
information in semantically sound manners. Developing such mappings has been
the focus of a variety of works originating from diverse communities over a
number of years. In this article we comprehensively review and present these
works. We also provide insights on the pragmatics of ontology mapping and
elaborate on a theoretical approach for defining ontology mapping.
The
enterprise ontology
Uschold, M., King, M., Moralee, S., Zorgios, Y. 1998 Knowledge Engineering Review 13 (1), pp.
31-89
This is a
comprehensive description of the Enterprise Ontology, a collection of terms and
definitions relevant to business enterprises. We state its intended purposes,
describe how we went about building it, define all the terms and describe our
experiences in converting these into formal definitions. We then describe how
we used the Enterprise Ontology and give an evaluation which
compares the actual uses with original purposes. We conclude by summarising what we have learned. The Enterprise Ontology
was developed within the Enterprise Project, a collaborative effort to provide
a framework for enterprise modelling. The ontology
was built to serve as a basis for this framework which
includes methods and a computer tool set for enterprise modelling.
We give an overview of the Enterprise Project, elaborate on the intended use of
the ontology, and give a brief overview of the process we went through to build
it. The scope of the Enterprise Ontology covers those core concepts required
for the project, which will appeal to a wider audience. We present natural
language definitions for all the terms, starting with the foundational concepts
(e.g. entity, relationship, actor). These are used to define the main body of
terms, which are divided into the following subject areas: activities, organisation, strategy and marketing. We review some of the
things learned during the formalisation process of
converting the natural language definitions into Ontolingua.
We identify and propose solutions for what may be general problems occurring in
the development of a wide range of ontologies in other domains. We then characterise in general terms the sorts of issues that will
be faced when converting an informal ontology into a formal one. Finally, we
describe our experiences in using the Enterprise Ontology. We compare these
with the intended uses, noting our successes and failures. We conclude with an
overall evaluation and summary of what we have learned.
Using
explicit ontologies in KBS development
Van Heijst, G., Schreiber, A.Th., Wielinga,
B.J.
1997 International Journal
of Human Computer Studies 46 (2-3), pp. 183-292
This
article presents a number of ways in which ontologies - schematic descriptions
of the contents of domain knowledge - can be constructed and can be used to
improve the knowledge engineering process. The main message is that early in
the knowledge engineering process an application-specific ontology should be
constructed. To facilitate this, the article presents some principles for
organizing a library of reusable ontological theories which
can be configured into an application ontology. This application ontology is
then exploited to organize the knowledge acquisition process and to support
computational design. The process is illustrated with a knowledge engineering
scenario in the domain of treating acute radiation syndrome.
Knowledge
processes and ontologies
Staab, S., Studer, R., Schnurr,
H.-P., Sure, Y. 2001 IEEE Intelligent Systems and Their
Applications 16 (1), pp. 26-34
An approach
for ontology-based knowledge management (KM) that includes a suite of
ontology-based tools as well as a methodology for developing ontology-based KM
systems is presented. The approach is illustrated by CHAR, a
knowledge management system for corporate history analysis.
OBSERVER:
An Approach for Query Processing in Global Information Systems Based on
Interoperation Across Pre-Existing Ontologies
Mena, E., Illarramendi, A., Kashyap, V., Sheth, A.P. 2000 Distributed and Parallel Databases 8 (2),
pp. 223-271
There has
been an explosion in the types, availability and volume of data accessible in
an information system, thanks to the World Wide Web (the Web) and related
inter-networking technologies. In this environment, there is a critical need to
replace or complement earlier database integration approaches and current
browsing and keyword-based techniques with concept-based approaches. Ontologies
are increasingly becoming accepted as an important part of any concept or
semantics based solution, and there is increasing realization that any viable
solution will need to support multiple ontologies that may be independently
developed and managed. In particular, we consider the use of concepts from
pre-existing real world domain ontologies for describing the content of the underlying
data repositories. The most challenging issue in this approach is that of
vocabulary sharing, which involves dealing with the use of different terms or
concepts to describe similar information. In this paper, we describe the
architecture, design and implementation of the OBSERVER system. Brokering across the domain ontologies is enabled by representing
and utilizing interontology relationships such as
(but not limited to) synonyms, hyponyms and hypernyms
across terms in different ontologies. User queries are rewritten by
using these relationships to obtain translations across ontologies. Well established metrics like precision and recall based on
the extensions underlying the concepts are used to estimate the loss of
information, if any.
The state of
the art in ontology design: A survey and comparative review
Noy, N.F., Hafner, C.D. 1997 AI Magazine 18 (3),
pp. 53-74
In this
article, we develop a framework for comparing ontologies and place a number of
the more prominent ontologies into it. We have selected 10 specific projects
for this study, including general ontologies, domain-specific ones, and one
knowledge representation system. The comparison framework includes general
characteristics, such as the purpose of an ontology,
its coverage (general or domain specific), its size, and the formalism used. It
also includes the design process used in creating an ontology
and the methods used to evaluate it. Characteristics that describe the content
of an ontology include taxonomic organization, types
of concept covered, top-level divisions, internal structure of concepts,
representation of part-whole relations, and the presence and nature of
additional axioms. Finally, we consider what experiments or applications have
used the ontologies. Knowledge sharing and reuse will require a common
framework to support interoperability of independently created ontologies. Our
study shows there is great diversity in the way ontologies are designed and the
way they represent the world. By identifying the similarities and differences
among existing ontologies, we clarify the range of alternatives in creating a
standard framework for ontology design.
Understanding,
building and using ontologies
Guarino, N. 1997 International Journal of Human Computer Studies
46 (2-3), pp. 293-310
I defend
here the thesis of the independence between domain knowledge and
problem-solving knowledge, arguing against the dominance of the so-called
"interaction problem" mentioned in a recent paper by Van Heijst, Schreiber and Wielinga to
dispute the feasibility of a single domain ontology shared by a number of
different applications. The main point is that reusability across multiple
tasks or methods can and should be systematically pursued even when modelling knowledge related to a single task or method.
Under this view, I discuss how the principles of formal ontology and
ontological engineering can be used in the practice of knowledge engineering,
focusing in particular on the interplay between general ontologies, method ontologies
and application ontologies, and on the role of ontologies in the knowledge
engineering process. I will then stress the role of domain analysis, often
absent in current methodologies for the development of knowledge-based systems.
The PROMPT
suite: Interactive tools for ontology merging and mapping
Noy, N.F., Musen, M.A. 2003 International Journal
of Human Computer Studies 59 (6), pp. 983-1024
Researchers
in the ontology-design field have developed the content for ontologies in many
domain areas. This distributed nature of ontology development has led to a
large number of ontologies covering overlapping domains. In order for these
ontologies to be reused, they first need to be merged or aligned to one
another. We developed a suite of tools for managing multiple ontologies. These suite provides users with a uniform framework for
comparing, aligning, and merging ontologies, maintaining versions, translating
between different formalisms. Two of the tools in the suite support
semi-automatic ontology merging: iPrompt is an
interactive ontology-merging tool that guides the user through the merging
process, presenting him with suggestions for next steps and identifying
inconsistencies and potential problems. AnchorPrompt
uses a graph structure of ontologies to find correlation between concepts and
to provide additional information for iPrompt.
Learning to
match ontologies on the Semantic Web
Doan, A.H., Madhavan, J., Dhamankar, R., Domingos, P.,
Halevy, A.
2003 VLDB Journal 12 (4), pp. 303-319
On the
Semantic Web, data will inevitably come from many different
ontologies, and information processing across ontologies is not possible
without knowing the semantic mapping between them. Manually finding such
mappings is tedious, error-prone, and clearly not possible on the Web scale.
Hence the development of tools to assist in the ontology mapping process is
crucial to the success of the Semantic Web. We described GLUE, a system that
employs machine learning techniques to find such
mappings. Given two ontologies, for each concept in one
ontology GLUE finds the most similar concept in the other ontology. We
give well-founded probabilistic definitions to several practical similarity
measures and show that GLUE can work with all of them. Another key feature of
GLUE is that it uses multiple learning strategies, each of which exploits well
a different type of information either in the data instances or in the
taxonomic structure of the ontologies. To further improve matching accuracy, we
extend GLUE to incorporate commonsense knowledge and domain constraints into
the matching process. Our approach is thus distinguished in that it works with
a variety of well-defined similarity notions and that is efficiently
incorporates multiple types of knowledge. We describe a set of experiments on
several real-world domains and show that GLUE proposes highly accurate semantic
mappings. Finally, we extend GLUE to find complex mappings between ontologies
and describe experiments that show the promise of the approach.
Semantic
web services
McIlraith, S.A., Son, T.C.,
Zeng, H. 2001 IEEE Intelligent Systems and Their
Applications 16 (2), pp. 46-53
The Web is
gradually evolving as provider of services along with its text and image
processing functions. Web services markup is proposed in the Defense advance
research project agency's agent markup language (DAML)
family of semantic Webmarkup languages. The markup provide an agent-independant
declarative API to capture the data and metadata associated with a service.
Sharing, reuse, composition, mapping and succint
local Web service markup is facilitated by the exploitation of ontologies by
markup. A wide variety of agent technologies for automated Web services
discovery, execution, composition and interoperation is enabled by this markup.
Agents and
the semantic web
Hendler, J.
2001 IEEE
Intelligent Systems and Their Applications 16 (2), pp. 30-37
Ontologies
are required to bring communicating multiagent
systems to the Web. There will be less human intervention in the programs to
perform tasks for the users more efficiently with the integration of agent technologyand ontilogies. It will
enable vision comprising agents running around the Web
performing complex actions for their users.
Creating
semantic web contents with protŽgŽ-2000
Noy, N.F., Sintek, M., Decker, S., CrubŽzy, M., Fergerson, R.W., Musen, M.A. 2001 IEEE Intelligent Systems and Their
Applications 16 (2), pp. 60-71
In order to
express information in aprecise machine-interpretable
form, Semantic Web is required. An understanding of what the
terms describing a data mean is shared by the software agents processing the
data. A tool, Protege-2000 has been proposed
for Semantic Web development and knowledge acquisition. This can be used for
editing models in different Semantic Web languages. Ontologies
have been used by Artificial Intelligence researchers to express a shared
understanding of information.
Composing
web services on the Semantic Web
Medjahed, B., Bouguettaya, A., Elmagarmid, A.K. 2003 VLDB
Journal 12 (4), pp. 333-351
Service
composition is gaining momentum as the potential silver bullet for the
envisioned Semantic Web. It purports to take the Web to unexplored efficiencies
and provide a flexible approach for promoting all types of activities in
tomorrow's Web. Applications expected to heavily take advantage of Web service
composition include B2B E-commerce and E-government.
To date, enabling composite services has largely been an ad hoc,
time-consuming, and error-prone process involving repetitive low-level
programming. In this paper, we propose an ontology-based framework for the
automatic composition of Web services. We present a technique to generate
composite services from high-level declarative descriptions. We define formal
safeguards for meaningful composition through the use of composability
rules. These rules compare the syntactic and semantic features of Web services
to determine whether two services are composable. We
provide an implementation using an E-government application offering customized
services to indigent citizens. Finally, we present an exhaustive performance
experiment to assess the scalability of our approach.
Automated
discovery, interaction and composition of Semantic Web services
Sycara, K., Paolucci,
M., Ankolekar, A., Srinivasan,
N. 2003 Web Semantics 1 (1),
pp. 27-46
In this
paper, we introduce a vision for Semantic Web services which
combines the growing Web services architecture and the Semantic Web and
we will propose DAML-S as a prototypical example of
an ontology for describing Semantic Web services. Furthermore, we show that DAML-S is not just an abstract description, but it can be
efficiently implemented to support capability matching and to manage
interaction between Web services. Specifically, we will describe the
implementation of the DAML-S/UDDI Matchmaker that
expands on UDDI by providing semantic capability matching, and we will present
the DAML-S Virtual Machine that uses the DAML-S Process Model to manage the interaction with Web
service. We will also show that the use of DAML-S
does not produce a performance penalty during the normal operation of Web
services.
Service
composition is gaining momentum as the potential silver bullet for the
envisioned Semantic Web. It purports to take the Web to unexplored efficiencies
and provide a flexible approach for promoting all types of activities in
tomorrow's Web. Applications expected to heavily take advantage of Web service
composition include B2B E-commerce and E-government.
To date, enabling composite services has largely been an ad hoc,
time-consuming, and error-prone process involving repetitive low-level
programming. In this paper, we propose an ontology-based framework for the
automatic composition of Web services. We present a technique to generate
composite services from high-level declarative descriptions. We define formal
safeguards for meaningful composition through the use of composability
rules. These rules compare the syntactic and semantic features of Web services
to determine whether two services are composable. We
provide an implementation using an E-government application offering customized
services to indigent citizens. Finally, we present an exhaustive performance
experiment to assess the scalability of our approach.
Semantic
Web: The roles of XML and RDF
Decker, S.,
Melnik, S., Van Harmelen,
F., Fensel, D., Klein, M., Broekstra,
J., Erdmann, M., Horrocks, I. 2000 IEEE Internet
Computing 4 (5), pp. 63-74
The role of
ontologies in the architecture of the Semantic Web was described. Extensible
markup language (XML) and resource description framework (RDF) are the current
standards for establishing semantic interoperability on the Web, but XML
addresses only document structure. RDF better facilitates interoperation
because it provides a data model that can be extended to address sophisticated
ontology representation techniques. A general method for encoding ontology
representation languages into RDF/RDF schema was proposed to establish a inference layer on top of the Web's current layers.
Ontology
languages for the semantic web
G—mez-PŽrez, A., Corcho,
O. 2002 IEEE Intelligent
Systems and Their Applications 17 (1), pp. 54-60
Ontologies
have proven to be an essential element in many applications. In particular,
ontologies are useful for applications in which knowledge plays a key role and
also trigger a major change in current Web contents. The most representative
ontology languages created for the Web are analyzed and compared using a common
framework.
Filtering
and selecting semantic web services with interactive composition techniques
Sirin, E., Parsia, B., Hendler,
J. 2004 IEEE Intelligent
Systems 19 (4), pp. 42-49
The utility
of Semantic Web Service descriptions for service composition is discussed. A
goal-oriented, interactive composition approach, that uses matchmaking
algorithms, help users to filter and select services while building the
composition. Web services provide interoperability between diverse applications,
using platform- and language-independent interfaces for easily integrating
heterogeneous systems. The service composition in the current framework
requires a human in the loop. A human who has the domain knowledge for the task
must guide the overall composition process while the composer determines the
relevant choices at each step.
DAML+OIL: An ontology language for the Semantic Web
McGuinness,
D.L.,
Fikes, R., Hendler, J.,
Stein, L.A.
2002 IEEE
Intelligent Systems 17 (5), pp. 72-80
By all
measures, the Web is enormous and growing at a staggering rate, which has made
it increasingly difficult-and important-for both people and programs to get
quick and accurate access to Web information and services. The Semantic Web
offers a solution, capturing and exploiting the meaning of terms to transform
the Web from a platform that focuses on understanding and reasoning with
information. This paper focuses on Defense Advanced Research projects Agency
Agent markup Language's (DAML's) current markup language,
DAML+OIL, which is a proposed starting point for the W3C's Semantic Web Activity's Ontology Web Language (OWL).
A
conceptual architecture for Semantic Web enabled web services
Bussler, C., Fensel, D., Maedche,
A. 2002 SIGMOD
Record 31 (4), pp. 24-29
Semantic
Web Enabled Web Services (SWWS) will transform the
web from a static collection of information into a distributed device of
computation on the basis of Semantic Web technology making content within the
World Wide Web machine-processable and
machine-interpretable. Semantic Web Enabled Web Services will allow the
automatic discovery, selection and execution of inter-organization business
logic making areas like dynamic supply chain composition a reality. In this
paper we introduce the vision of Semantic Web Enabled Web Services, describe
requirements for building semantics-driven web services and sketch a first
draft of a conceptual architecture for implementing semantic web enabled web
services.
Managing
multiple and distributed ontologies on the Semantic Web
Maedche, A., Motik, B., Stojanovic,
L. 2003 VLDB
Journal 12 (4), pp. 286-302
In
traditional software systems, significant attention is devoted to keeping
modules well separated and coherent with respect to functionality, thus
ensuring that changes in the system are localized to a handful of modules.
Reuse is seen as the key method in reaching that goal. Ontology-based systems
on the Semantic Web are just a special class of software systems, so the same
principles apply. In this article, we present an integrated framework for
managing multiple and distributed ontologies on the Semant
ic Web. It is based on the
representation model for ontologies, trading off between expressivity and
tractability. In our framework, we provide features for reusing existing
ontologies and for evolving them while retaining the consistency. The approach
is implemented within KAON, the Karlsruhe Ontology
and Semantic Web tool suite.
Autonomous
semantic web services
Paolucci, M., Sycara,
K. 2003 IEEE Internet
Computing 7 (5), pp. 34-41
As a first
step toward the vision of using the Semantic Web to support capability-based
discovery and interoperation at runtime, formal languages and inference
mechanisms for representing and reasoning with core Web service concepts need
to be developed. The DARPA Agent Markup Language for
Services (DAML-S) is the first attempt to define such
a language. This paper describes DAML-S and some
example computational models that show how it can be viewed as the first step
in bridging the gap between the Semantic Web and proposed industry standards
for Web services.
The
semantic web: Yet another hip?
Ding, Y., Fensel, D., Klein, M., Omelayenko,
B. 2002 Data and Knowledge
Engineering 41 (2-3), pp. 205-227
Currently,
computers are changing from single, isolated devices into entry points to a
worldwide network of information exchange and business transactions called the
World Wide Web (WWW). For this reason, support in data, information, and
knowledge exchange has become a key issue in current computer technology. The
success of the WWW has made it increasingly difficult to find, access, present,
and maintain the information required by a wide variety of users. In response
to this problem, many new research initiatives and commercial enterprises have
been set up to enrich available information with machine processable
semantics. This semantic web will provide intelligent access to heterogeneous,
distributed information, enabling software products (agents) to mediate between
user needs and the information sources available. This paper summarizes ongoing
research in the area of the semantic web, focusing especially on ontology
technology.
Dynamic
discovery and coordination of agent-based semantic web services
Sycara, K., Paolucci,
M., Soudry, J., Srinivasan,
N. 2004 IEEE Internet
Computing 8 (3), pp. 66-73
Matchmaking
and brokering are multiagent coordination mechanisms
for Web services. Both have performance trade-offs, but the Web Ontology Language
for Semantic Web Services (OWL-S) can handle extensions that address some of
the shortcomings. In this article, the authors focus on the broker, analyzing
both its interaction protocol and reasoning tasks. The authors also describe
OWL-S's exec extensions, detail their implementation's basic features, and
explain how these features address the broker's reasoning problems.
Managing
semantic content for the Web
Sheth, A., Bertram, C., Avant, D., Hammond,
B., Kochut, K., Warke,
Y. 2002 IEEE Internet
Computing 6 (4), pp. 80-87
The
management of the semantic content for the web was discussed. Semantic Content
Organization and Retrieval Engine (SCORE) provides facilities to define
ontological components that software agents could maintain. Syntactic metadata
describe noncontextutal information about content,
such as language, bit rate, and format. Semantic metadata describe
domain-specific information about the content. Ontologies provide the context
for semantic metadata.
Ontology
based context modeling and reasoning using OWL
Wang, X.H.,
Zhang, D.Q., Gu, T., Pung, H.K. 2004 Proceedings - Second
IEEE Annual Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications, Workshops, PerCom, pp. 18-22
In this
paper we propose an OWL encoded context ontology
(CONON) for modeling context in pervasive computing environments, and for
supporting logic-based context reasoning. CONON provides an upper context
ontology that captures general concepts about basic context, and also provides
extensibility for adding domain-specific ontology in a hierarchical manner.
Based on this context ontology, we have studied the use of logic reasoning to
check the consistency of context information, and to reason over low-level,
explicit context to derive high-level, implicit context. By giving a
performance study for our prototype, we quantitatively evaluate the feasibility
of logic based context reasoning for nontime-critical applications in pervasive computing
environments, where we always have to deal carefully with the limitation of
computational resources.
C-OWL:
Contextualizing ontologies
Bouquet, P., Giunchiglia, F., Van Harmelen, F., Serafini, L., Stuckenschmidt, H. 2003 Lecture Notes in Computer Science
(including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes
in Bioinformatics) 2870, pp. 164-179
Ontologies
are shared models of a domain that encode a view which
is common to a set of different parties. Contexts are local models that encode
a party's subjective view of a domain. In this paper we show how ontologies can
be contextualized, thus acquiring certain useful properties that a pure shared
approach cannot provide. We say that an ontology is contextualized or, also,
that it is a contextual ontology, when its contents are kept local, and
therefore not shared with other ontologies, and mapped with the contents of
other ontologies via explicit (context) mappings. The result is Context OWL
(C-OWL), a language whose syntax and semantics have been obtained by extending
the OWL syntax and semantics to allow for the representation of contextual
ontologies.
Foundations
for service ontologies: Aligning OWL-S to DOLCE
Mika, P., Gangemi, A., Oberle, D., Sabou, M. 2004 Thirteenth International World Wide Web
Conference Proceedings, WWW2004, pp. 563-572
Clarity in
semantics and a rich formalization of this semantics are important requirements
for ontologies designed to be deployed in large-scale, open, distributed
systems such as the envisioned Semantic Web. This is especially important for
the description of Web Services, which should enable complex tasks involving
multiple agents. As one of the first initiatives of the Semantic Web community
for describing Web Services, OWL-S attracts a lot of interest even though it is
still under development. We identify problematic aspects of OWL-S and suggest
enhancements through alignment to a foundational ontology. Another contribution
of our work is the Core Ontology of Services that tries to fill the
epistemological gap between the foundational ontology and OWL-S. It can be
reused to align other Web Service description languages as well. Finally, we
demonstrate the applicability of our work by aligning OWL-S' standard example
called CongoBuy.