Sylvie Szulman

Revisiting Ontology Design: A Methodology Based on Corpus Analysis

We promote a new approach for knowledge modelling based on knowledge elicitation from technical documents. It benefits of the increasing amount of available electronic texts and of the maturity of natural language processing tools. The approach defines a framework where the knowledge engineer selects the appropriate tools, combines their use and interprets their results to build up a domain model. The paper presents the method and reports an on-going application to design an ontology of knowledge engineering tools in French.

TERMINAE: A Linguistic-Based Tool for the Building of a Domain Ontology

The purpose of TERMINAE is to help building an ontology, both from scratch and from texts, without control by any task. Requirements have been defined for a methodology on the basis of real experiments. TERMINAE fulfills these requirements, involving theoretical bases from linguistics and knowledge representation. Its strong points are integration of a terminological approach and an ontology management, precise definition of concept types reflecting modeling choices, and traceability facilities. This paper presents briefly the experiments leading to the requirements, and focuses on the tool and its underlying methodology.

Merging of legal micro-ontologies from Europen directives

This paper describes the construction method of a legal application ontology. This method is based on the merging of micro-ontologies built from European community directives. The terminae construction method from texts enhanced by an alignment process with a core legal ontology is used for building micro-ontologies. A merging process allows constructing the legal ontology.

An Environment for the Joint Management of Written Policies and Business Rules

The contemporary world produces huge bodies of policies and regulations, while the underlying procedures tend to be automated in decision systems, which are designed to define, deploy, execute, monitor and maintain the various rules to which an organization or enterprise has to comply. It is important that the written documentation is integrated into such decision systems in order to refer to the texts to explain decisions, to update the systems when the policy evolves or, conversely, to amend the source documents if some of the rules happen to be inconsistent. The problem is that the complexity of information to be searched for is not reachable by an automated processing, but that their volume prohibits a manual one. Arguing that the integration of policies in decision systems can be better achieved through a semantic annotation than by the full parsing of the source documentation, this paper presents a technical environment that enables the building and exploitation of such semantic annotations.

TERMINAE method and integration process for legal ontology building

This paper describes the contruction method of a legal application ontology. This method is based on the merging of micro-ontologies built from European community directives. The terminae construction method from texts enhanced by an alignment process with a core legal ontology is used for building micro-ontologies. A merging process allows constructing the legal ontology.

Lexicalized ontology for a business rules management platform: an automotive use case

This paper describes a platform that helps industrial domain experts to preserve the connection between textual sources and formalized business rules by using lexicalized ontologies both for links and for storage of the conceptual knowledge. Business Rules Management Systems (BRMSs) are used to update and query business rules of an automotive use case. They rely strongly on domain ontologies, which model the business knowledge and provide a conceptual vocabulary for the formalization of the rules that are expressed in written policies. We show that lexicalized ontologies are a key component of such BRMSs and how such knowledge can be encoded. Our proposed solution supports domain experts in the automotive industry in understanding and maintaining their business rules by presenting the relevant source documents that were used to create the ontological concepts. The use case is based on a car development scenario that models the connection between car testing scenarios, e.g., safety tests, and the methods and tools used to analyze and prepare these tests. The intended solution has been developed in the ONTORULE project and is still work in progress.

Acquisition and Validation: From Text to Semantic Network

This paper presents how modeling knowledge in a logic-based semantic network allows domain knowledge acquisition from texts and its validation.

Spécification des compléments de service rnis: du langage naturel À la représentation des connaissances

Cet article decritle passage de specifications redigees en langage naturel a leur representation dans un formalisme de representation des connaissances. Le point central de l’article reside en l’elaboration d’un noyau de base de connaissances terminologique, c’est-a-dire d’une ontologie, a partir de textes. Une methodologie est presentee ainsi que les principes sur lesquels elle repose. Un outil d’aide a ete developpe pour sa mise en œuvre. Cette methodologie a ete appliquee au domaine des complements de service RNIS et l’ontologie resultante a ete utilisee pour representer automatiquement des textes de specification.We present a study on the formalization of software specification written in natural language, more precisely on the translation from natural language to conceptual representation of texts which specify ISDN supplementary services. The paper focuses on a methodology to build the terminological base kernel, usually called the domain ontology, from the corpus. The methodology and its basic principles will be described, with a tool supporting it. Finally it will be shown how the resulting kernel can be enriched by texts through a semantic natural language processing.RésuméCet article décritle passage de spécifications rédigées en langage naturel à leur représentation dans un formalisme de représentation des connaissances. Le point central de l’article réside en l’élaboration d’un noyau de base de connaissances terminologique, c’est-à-dire d’une ontologie, à partir de textes. Une méthodologie est présentée ainsi que les principes sur lesquels elle repose. Un outil d’aide a été développé pour sa mise en œuvre. Cette méthodologie a été appliquée au domaine des compléments de service RNIS et l’ontologie résultante a été utilisée pour représenter automatiquement des textes de spécification.