WhatIf: Answering "What if..." questions for Ontology Authoring

我们拥有关于我们活动的许多方面的丰富数据，但只有当我们知道它们是什么，同意它们是什么以及它们如何相互关联时，这些数据才有用处。数据的语义描述是我们实现这些目标的手段，被广泛用于帮助工业界、学术界和家庭利用数据。为数据提供这种含义或语义的一种方式是通过“本体”，然而这些本体可能很难构建，特别是对于那些在其知识被捕获的领域中是专家但在专门的“建模”领域中没有经验的人。在“如果...？“项目中，我们研究了使用Web本体语言（OWL）创建本体的问题。使用OWL逻辑形式，计算机可以推导出仅隐含在建模者的语句中的知识。因此，建模者所做的任何陈述都可能对隐含的内容产生戏剧性的影响。就建模者的目标而言，这些影响可以是“好的”也可以是“坏的”。因此，建模者总是问自己“如果......会怎样？“问题，因为他们的模型感兴趣的领域。这样一个问题可能是“如果我说一颗行星一定是绕着一颗星星运行会发生什么？或者“如果我加入这个日期/时间本体会发生什么？".“如果......？“项目是建立一个对话系统，允许一个人建立一个本体提出这样的问题，并得到有意义的答案。这需要让计算机确定本体中的变化的后果是什么，并让它以有意义的方式呈现这些后果。为了做好这项工作，系统必须了解人们试图做什么，以及什么样的结果对他们来说最有趣。为此，我们需要更多地了解本体论如何建模领域和工具交互;能够建模人类和创作系统之间的对话;实现响应式自动推理，可以为对话系统提供创建对话所需的信息。

We have a richness of data about numerous aspects of our activities, yet these data are only any use when we know what they are, agree upon what they are and how they relate to each other. Semantic descriptions of data, the means by which we can achieve these aims, are widely used to help exploit data in industry, academia and at home. One way of providing such meaning or semantics for data is through "ontologies", yet these ontologies can be hard to build, especially for the very people that are expert in the fields whose knowledgeis being captured but who are not experienced in the specialised "modelling" field. In the "what if...?" project we look atthe problems of creating ontologies using the Web Ontology Language (OWL). With OWL logical forms, computers can deduce knowledge that is only implied within the statements made by the modeller. So any statement made by a modeller can have a dramatic effect on what is implied. These implications can be both "good" and "bad" in terms of the aims of themodeller. Consequently, a modeller is always asking themself "what if...?" questions as they model a field of interest. Such a question might be "what happens if I say that a planetmust be orbiting a star?" or "what happens if I add in this date/time ontology?". The aim of the "what if...?" project is tobuild a dialogue system allowing a person building an ontologyto ask such questions and getmeaningful answers. This requires getting the computer to determine whatthe consequences of a change in the ontology would be and getting it topresent these consequences in a meaningful way. To do a good job,the system will have to understand something about what the person is tryingto do and what sorts of results will be most interesting to them. For this,we need to understand more about how ontologists model a domain and interact with tools; be able to model the dialogues between a human and the authoring system; achieve responsive auttomated reasoning that can provide the dialogue system with the information it nees to create that dialogue.