Aldo Gangemi

Sweetening Ontologies with DOLCE

In this paper we introduce the DOLCE upper level ontology, the first module of a Foundational Ontologies Library being developed within the WonderWeb project. DOLCE is presented here in an intuitive way; the reader should refer to the project deliverable for a detailed axiomatization. A comparison with WordNets top-level taxonomy of nouns is also provided, which shows how DOLCE, used in addition to the OntoClean methodology, helps isolating and understanding some major WordNet?s semantic limitations. We suggest that such analysis could hopefully lead to an ?ontologically sweetened? WordNet, meant to be conceptually more rigorous, cognitively transparent, and efficiently exploitable in several applications.

Ontology learning and its application to automated terminology translation

Our OntoLearn system is an infrastructure for automated ontology learning from domain text. It is the only system, as far as we know, that uses natural language processing and machine learning techniques, and is part of a more general ontology engineering architecture. We describe the system and an experiment in which we used a machine-learned tourism ontology to automatically translate multiword terms from English to Italian. The method can apply to other domains without manual adaptation.

Ontology Design Patterns

Computational ontologies in the context of information systems are artifacts that encode a description of some world, for some purpose. Under the assumption that there exist classes of problems that can be solved by applying common solutions (as it has been experienced in software engineering), we envision small, task-oriented ontologies with explicit documentation of design rationales. In this chapter, we describe components called Ontology Design Patterns (OP), and methods that support pattern-based ontology design.

Understanding the Semantic Web through Descriptions and Situations

The Semantic Web is a powerful vision that is getting to grips with the challenge of providing more human-oriented web services. Hence, reasoning with and across distributed, partially implicit assumptions (contextual knowledge), is a milestone.

Modelling ontology evaluation and validation

We present a comprehensive approach to ontology evaluation and validation, which have become a crucial problem for the development of semantic technologies. Existing evaluation methods are integrated into one sigle framework by means of a formal model. This model consists, firstly, of a meta-ontology called O2, that characterises ontologies as semiotic objects. Based on O2 and an analysis of existing methodologies, we identify three main types of measures for evaluation: structural measures, that are typical of ontologies represented as graphs; functional measures, that are related to the intended use of an ontology and of its components; and usability-profiling measures, that depend on the level of annotation of the considered ontology. The meta-ontology is then complemented with an ontology of ontology validation called oQual, which provides the means to devise the best set of criteria for choosing an ontology over others in the context of a given project. Finally, we provide a small example of how to apply oQual-derived criteria to a validation case.

An overview of the ONIONS project: applying ontologies to the integration of medical terminologies

Abstract The paper presents a review of the ONIONS project. ONIONS is committed to developing a large-scale, axiomatized ontology library for medical terminology. The developed methodology exploits a description logic-based design for the modules in the library and makes extended use of generic theories, thus creating a stratification of the modules. Terminological knowledge is acquired by conceptual analysis and ontology integration over a set of authoritative sources. After addressing general issues about conceptual analysis and integration, the methodology is briefly described. The central part of the paper presents the investigation we have made on the 476,000 medical concepts singled out by the National Library of Medicine as the MetathesaurusTM in the UMLS project. This is followed by several case studies concerning lexical polysemy, the interface between ontologies. A section describing the current structure of the library and the generic theories reused is provided. Current results of our research include the integration of some top-level ontologies in the ON9.2 ontology library, and the formalization of the terminological knowledge in the UMLS Metathesaurus.

Knowledge Engineering: Practice and Patterns

Invited Talks.- Knowledge Patterns.- Computational Semantics and Knowledge Engineering.- Principles for Knowledge Engineering on the Web.- Knowledge Patterns and Knowledge Representation.- Applying Ontology Design Patterns in Bio-ontologies.- A Pattern and Rule-Based Approach for Reusing Adaptive Hypermedia Creators Models.- Natural Language-Based Approach for Helping in the Reuse of Ontology Design Patterns.- On the Influence of Description Logics Ontologies on Conceptual Similarity.- Polishing Diamonds in OWL 2.- Formalizing Ontology Modularization through the Notion of Interfaces.- Correspondence Patterns for Ontology Alignment.- Matching Ontologies and Data Integration.- Learning Disjointness for Debugging Mappings between Lightweight Ontologies.- Towards a Rule-Based Matcher Selection.- An Analysis of the Origin of Ontology Mismatches on the Semantic Web.- Preference-Based Uncertain Data Integration.- Natural Language, Knowledge Acquisition and Annotations.- Unsupervised Discovery of Compound Entities for Relationship Extraction.- Formal Concept Analysis: A Unified Framework for Building and Refining Ontologies.- Contextualized Knowledge Acquisition in a Personal Semantic Wiki.- Using the Intension of Classes and Properties Definition in Ontologies for Word Sense Disambiguation.- Mapping General-Specific Noun Relationships to WordNet Hypernym/Hyponym Relations.- Analysing Ontological Structures through Name Pattern Tracking.- Semi-automatic Construction of an Ontology and of Semantic Annotations from a Discussion Forum of a Community of Practice.- OMEGA: An Automatic Ontology Metadata Generation Algorithm.- Automatic Tag Suggestion Based on Resource Contents.- Integration of Semantically Annotated Data by the KnoFuss Architecture.- Search, Query and Interaction.- A Visual Approach to Semantic Query Design Using a Web-Based Graphical Query Designer.- Search Query Generation with MCRDR Document Classification Knowledge.- Ontological Profiles in Enterprise Search.- Ontologies.- A Generic Ontology for Collaborative Ontology-Development Workflows.- GoodRelations: An Ontology for Describing Products and Services Offers on the Web.- An Ontology-Centric Approach to Sensor-Mission Assignment.- Ontology Based Legislative Drafting: Design and Implementation of a Multilingual Knowledge Resource.- Situated Cognition in the Semantic Web Era.- E-Business Vocabularies as a Moving Target: Quantifying the Conceptual Dynamics in Domains.- A Platform for Object-Action Semantic Web Interaction.

The OntoWordNet project: Extension and axiomatization of conceptual relations in WordNet

In this paper we present a progress report of the OntoWordNet project, a research program aimed at achieving a formal specification of WordNet. Within this program, we developed a hybrid bottom-up top-down methodology to automatically extract association relations from WordNet, and to interpret those associations in terms of a set of conceptual relations, formally defined in the DOLCE foundational ontology. Preliminary results provide us with the conviction that a research program aiming to obtain a consistent, modularized, and axiomatized ontology from WordNet can be completed in acceptable time with the support of semi-automatic techniques.

Content Ontology Design Patterns as Practical Building Blocks for Web Ontologies

In this paper we present how to extract and describe emerging content ontology design patterns, and how to compose, specialize and expand them for ontology design, with particular focus on Semantic Web technologies. We exemplify the described techniques with respect to the extraction of two content ontology design patterns from the DOLCE+DnS Ultra Lite ontology, and by showing the design of a simplified ontology for the music industry domain.

A constructive framework for legal ontologies

The increasing development of legal ontologies seems to offer interesting solutions to legal knowledge formalization, which in past experiences lead to a limited exploitation of legal expert systems for practical use. The paper describes how a constructive approach to ontology can provide useful components to create newly designed legal decision support systems either as local or Web-based semantic services. We describe the relation of our research to AI&Law and legal philosophy, the components of our Core Legal Ontology, the JurWordNet semantic lexicon, and some examples of use of legal ontologies for both norm conformity and compatibility. Our legal ontologies are based on DOLCE+, an extension of the DOLCE foundational ontology developed in the WonderWeb and Metokis EU projects.