Design and Evaluation of Mid-level Ontologies

电子商务、电子政务和电子科学领域的许多应用都需要各种数据集的语义集成以及不同软件系统和服务之间的语义互操作性。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，而没有对它们之间的元逻辑关系的清晰理解。*-本体的设计受到阻碍，因为预期模型难以表征，即使有了这种表征，预期模型的类别也很难公理化。*-本体的弱公理化允许意外模型的存在；这对于决策支持系统来说是有问题的，因为存在着由所有预期的本体模型所包含的句子，但这些句子不能从公理中得到证明。*-缺乏模块化抑制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显式地指定了本体之间的元理论关系，如保守扩展、非保守扩展和可定义解释。这允许显式地确定由同一域中的多个本体共享的公共子理论。此外，这些关系可以用来验证本体的预期模型是否等同于公理化的模型，并且这种验证可以用来模块化本体。** Cyc和SUMO等上层本体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，一种可能的方法是设计介于领域本体和通用本体之间的本体。然而，还没有对这种中级本体的正式描述。**为了应对这些挑战，本项目有以下目标：指定现有领域本体之间的元逻辑关系（在COLORE中使用）。通过合并一般本体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的评估。通过通用本体的定义扩展来设计中级本体。指定基于元论关系的领域本体模块化技术。实现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：GoodRelations、FIBO、度量单位、日期-时间词汇表、SCRIBE、基础解剖学模型、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.