Design and Evaluation of Mid-level Ontologies

电子商务、电子政务和电子科学等领域的许多应用都需要对各种数据集进行语义集成，并在不同的软件系统和服务之间实现语义互操作。尽管已经提出了用于决策支持和语义集成的领域本体，但仍然存在许多挑战： -在同一领域内，存在多个相互冲突的本体论，对它们之间的元数学关系没有明确的理解。 -本体的设计受到阻碍，因为预期的模型很难刻画，即使有了这种刻画，预期的模型的类别也很难公理。 -本体的弱公理化允许非预期模型的存在；这对决策支持系统来说是有问题的，因为将存在 由所有预期的本体论模型所蕴含，但不能从公理中得到证明。 -缺乏模块化阻碍了大型本体的可重用性。 Colore的内容现在允许我们解决本体设计和评估中的基本问题。Colore明确规定了本体之间的元理论关系，如保守扩张、非保守扩张和可定义解释。这使人们能够明确地确定以下共同子理论 由同一领域中的多个本体共享。此外，这些关系可用于验证本体的预期模型是否与公理模型等价，并且该验证可用于模块化本体。 上层本体，如Cyc和SUMO，通过定义概念来应对上述挑战，这些概念是通用概念的专门化和领域本体的泛化。由于存储库包含许多通用本体，因此一种可能的方法是设计介于领域和通用本体之间的本体。 然而，目前还没有对这种中层本体论的正式描述。 为了应对这些挑战，该项目有以下目标： 1.指定现有领域本体之间的元关系(用颜色表示)。 2.通过合并通用本体来设计新的模块化中层本体，然后根据它们的逻辑和数学性质对它们进行形式化评估。 3.通过泛型本体的定义扩展来设计中层本体。 4.根据领域本体的元关系，指定领域本体的模块化技术。 5.实现了一个支持本体设计和评估的软件环境 以下领域本体将在本项目的范围内：GoodRelationship、FIBO、度量单位、日期-时间词汇表、SCRIBE、基本解剖模型、BioPAX，以及用于语义Web应用程序的事件、地址和产品的各种本体。

Many applications in the domains of e-commerce, e-government, and e-science require the semantic integration of a wide variety of datasets and semantic interoperability among diverse software systems and services. Although domain ontologies have been proposed for decision support and semantic integration, a number of challenges remain: - Within the same domain, there are multiple conflicting ontologies, without a clear understanding of the metalogical relationships between them. - The design of an ontology is hindered because the intended models are difficult to characterize, and even with this characterization, the class of intended models can be difficult to axiomatize. - Weak axiomatizations of an ontology allow the existence of unintended models; this is problematic for decision support systems insofar as there will exist sentences that are entailed by all intended models of the ontology but which are not provable from the axioms. - The lack of modularization inhibits the reusability of large ontologies. The content of COLORE now allows us to address fundamental problems in ontology design and evaluation. COLORE explicitly specifies the metatheoretic relationships among ontologies, such as conservative extension, nonconservative extension, and definable interpretation. This allows one to explicitly determine common subtheories that are shared by multiple ontologies in the same domain. Furthermore, these relationships can be used to verify that the intended models of an ontology are equivalent to the models of the axiomatization, and this verification can be used to modularize the ontology. Upper ontologies such as Cyc and SUMO respond the above challenges by defining concepts which are specializations of generic concepts and generalizations of domain ontologies. Since repositories contain many generic ontologies, one possible approach is to design ontologies which are intermediate between the domain and generic ontologies. Nevertheless, there has been no formal characterization of such midlevel ontologies. To address these challenges, this project has the following objectives: 1. Specify the metalogical relationships (used in COLORE) among existing domain ontologies. 2. Design new modular midlevel ontologies by merging generic ontologies and then formally evaluate them with respect to their logical and mathematical properties. 3. Design midlevel ontologies by definitional extensions of generic ontologies. 4. Specify techniques for the modularization of domain ontologies based on their metalogical relationships. 5. Implement a software environment to support ontology design and evaluation The following domain ontologies will be in the scope of this project: GoodRelations, FIBO, Units of Measure, Date-Time Vocabulary, SCRIBE, Foundational Model of Anatomy, BioPAX, together with the various ontologies for events, addresses, and products, which are used in Semantic Web applications.