• The Future of 

the Internet:
– Introduction
– The Syntactic Web
– The Semantic Web
– How the Semantic Web Will Work.
• Ontology in Computer Science
– Defining the Term Ontology
– Differences among Taxonomies
– Thesauri and Ontologies
• Classifying Ontologies
• Web Ontologies
– Web Ontology Description Languages
– Ontology - Categories and Intelligence.
 Bibliography
 The Semantic Web, Scientific American, May 2001,
Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila.
 Breitman, K.K., Casanova, M.A., & Truszkowski, W.
(2007) Semantic web: Concepts, Technologies and
Applications. Springer Verlag, London
 http://www.w3.org/
 Antoniou, G., Van Harmelen, F. `(2004) “A Semantic
web Primer”(see library or Pdf copy)
Where we are Today: the Syntactic Web

[Hendler & Miller 02]

4
 The Syntactic Web is…
• A hypermedia, a digital library
– A library of documents called (web pages) interconnected by a hypermedia of
links
• A database, an application platform
– A common portal to applications accessible through web pages, and presenting
their results as web pages
• A platform for multimedia
– BBC Radio 4 anywhere in the world! Terminator 3 trailers!
• A naming scheme
– Unique identity for those documents
A place where computers do the presentation (easy) and people do
the linking and interpreting (hard).
Why not get computers to do more of the hard work?
[Goble 03]
5
 Hard Work using the Syntactic Web…
Find images of Peter Patel-Schneider, Frank van Harmelen and Alan
Rector…

Rev. Alan M. Gates, Associate Rector of the

Church of the Holy Spirit, Lake Forest, Illinois

6
 Impossible(?) via the Syntactic Web…
• Complex queries involving background knowledge
– Find information about “animals that use sonar but are not either
bats or dolphins” , e.g.,
• Locating information in data repositories Barn
Owl
– Travel enquiries
– Prices of goods and services
– Results of human genome experiments
• Finding and using “web services”
– Visualise surface interactions between two proteins
• Delegating complex tasks to web “agents”
– Book me a holiday next weekend somewhere warm, not too far
away, and where they speak French or English
7
 What is the Problem?
• Consider a typical web page:
• Markup consists of:
– rendering information
(e.g., font size and
colour)
– Hyper-links to related
content
• Semantic content is
accessible to humans but
not (easily) to
computers…

8
 What information can we see…
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9
What information can a machine see…
WWW2002
The eleventh international world wide web conference
Sheraton waikiki hotel
Honolulu, hawaii, USA
7-11 may 2002
1 location 5 days learn interact
Registered participants coming from
australia, canada, chile denmark, france, germany, ghana, hong kong, india,
ireland, italy, japan, malta, new zealand, the netherlands, norway, singapore,
switzerland, the united kingdom, the united states, vietnam, zaire
Register now
On the 7th May Honolulu will provide

10
 Background
• Human are capable of using the Web to carry out
tasks such as;
– Finding the German word for “Morning”
– Searching and reserving books from library
– Searching for a low price for a DVD
– etc.
• However, a computer cannot accomplish the
tasks without human direction because;
– Web pages are designed to be read by human, not
machines

11
11
 Background
• A complex user query can be a big problem in finding
information on the Web.
– A query for “professor in faculty of engineering in universities in
the United States” may return results from the Web pages from
the other countries other than the United States.
• Most documents on the Web not only contain text
– also immense amount of images, sounds, video and other
multimedia files,
– these files are meaningless to computers.
• Semantic Web is a vision of information that is understandable by
computers, so that they can perform more of the tedious works
involved in finding, sharing, and combining information on the
Web.

12
12
 Background
• Semantic Web will overcome such the
problems by making the Web not only
human-understandable but also machine-
understandable.
• Semantic Web is a vision of information that
is understandable by computers, so that they
can perform more of the tedious works
involved in finding, sharing, and combining
information on the Web.

13
13
 Background
• Tim Berners-Lee expressed the vision of the
Semantic Web as follows:
I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable
of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and
transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’,
which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it
does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy, and our
daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The
‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally
materialize.

14
14
 Semantic Web
• It derives from W3C1 director Sir Tim Berners-Lee's vision
of the Web as a universal medium for data, information,
and knowledge exchange.

• The word semantics stand for the meaning of. The

semantics of something is the meaning of something.

• The Semantic Web is a web that is able to describe things

in a way that computers can understand.
– The Beatles was a popular band from Liverpool.
– John Lennon was a member of the Beatles.
– The record "Hey Jude" was recorded by the Beatles.

1. W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) is a forum for information, commerce, communication, and
collective understanding. W3C was founded in Oct. 1994. 15
15
 Semantic Web (Cont’d)
• Statements are built with syntax rules
– The syntax of a language defines the rules for
building the language statements. But how can
syntax become semantic?

• This is what the Semantic Web is all about:

– Describing things in a way that computer applications can
understand.
– The Semantic Web is not about links between Web pages.
– The Semantic Web describes the relationships among things
(e.g., A is a part of B and Y is a member of  Z) and the properties
of things (e.g., size, weight, age, and price).

16
16
 Semantic Web (Cont’d)
• Semantic Web (SW), proposed by W3C, is one of the most
promising and accepted approaches to make the Web
content becomes more machine-readable so that
intelligent agents can retrieve and process information
readily [Dong and Dan 05].

• The SW is a vision of the next generation of the WWW in

which information is given well-defined meaning
understandable by machines as well as humans [Lei 05].

17
17
 A Semantic Web — First Steps
Make web resources more accessible to automated processes
• Extend existing rendering markup with semantic markup
– Metadata annotations that describe content/function of web
accessible resources
• Use Ontologies to provide vocabulary for annotations
– “Formal specification” is accessible to machines

• A prerequisite is a standard web ontology language

– Need to agree common syntax before we can share semantics
– Syntactic web based on standards such as HTTP and HTML

18
 Why is there a need for the Semantic Web?
• Knowledge Management
– With the large number of documents made available online
by organizations, several document management systems
have entered the market. However, these systems have
severe weaknesses [Fensel et al. 03]:
• Searching information: Existing keyword-based search retrieves
irrelevant information that uses keyword in a context other than the
one in which the searcher is interested.
• Extracting information: Human browsing and reading is currently
required to extract relevant information from information sources, as
automatic agents lack the common sense knowledge required to
extract such information from textual representations and fail to
integrate information spread over different sources.

19
19
Why is there a need for the Semantic Web?
(Cont’d)
• Maintenance: Maintaining weakly-structured text sources is a
difficult and time-consuming activity when such sources become
large.
• Automatic document generation: Adaptive Web sites that enable a
dynamic reconfiguration of information according to user profiles or
other relevant aspects would be very useful.

– Semantic Web technology will enable structural and

semantic definitions of documents providing
completely new possibilities:
• Intelligent search instead of keyword matching.
• Query answering instead of information retrieval.
• Document exchange among departments via ontology
mapping.
20
20
 Why is there a need for the Semantic Web?
(Cont’d)
• Web Commerce
– Very early on in B2C (Business to Customer)
development, shopbots were developed that visit
several stores, extract product information, and
present to the customer an instant market overview.
– Their functionality is provided via wrappers written
for each online store. Such wrappers use a keyword
search together with assumptions on regularities in
the presentation format of stores’ Web sites and
text extraction heuristics, to find information about
the requested product and return it to the customer.
21
21
 Why is there a need for the Semantic Web?
(Cont’d)
• Web Commerce (Cont’d)
– However, this technology has two severe limitations:
• Effort: Writing a wrapper for each online store is a
time-consuming activity, and changes in the layout of
stores may result in high levels of required
maintenance to keep the wrappers up-to-date.
• Quality: The product information extracted by
shopbots using such technology is limited (mostly
price information), error prone, and incomplete.
– For example, a wrapper may extract the direct
price of product but miss indirect costs such as
shipping, or discount.

22
22
How Will the Semantic Web Work?
• In order to organize Web content, AI
researchers proposed a series of conceptual
models.
• The central idea is to categorize information in
a standard way.
– Similar to the solution used to classify living beings
– Biologists use a well-defined taxonomy. Likewise,
computer scientists are looking for similar model
to help structure Web content

23
 Themes related to the Semantic Web [Breitman et al. 07]

• Metadata
Concepts • Ontologies
• Ontology Languages
• Web Services

Semantic
Web

Applications Technologies
• Methodologies for
• Software agents
Ontology development
• Semantic desktop • Tools for Ontology
• Geospatial semantic web
development
• Ontology sources
24
How Will the Semantic Web Work?
• Metadata
– Metadata is “data about data”
– They serve to index Web pages and Web sites
in the Semantic Web
– Allowing other computers to acknowledge
what a Web page is about

25
How Will the Semantic Web Work?
• Ontologies
– In computer science, ontologies were adopted
in AI to facilitate knowledge sharing and reuse
[Fensel 01]
– Becoming widespread in areas:
• Intelligent information integration
• Cooperative information systems
• Agent-based software engineering
• E-commerce

26
How Will the Semantic Web Work?
• Ontologies

Sample ontology of a Computer Science Department [Doan et al. 03]

27
27
How Will the Semantic Web Work?
• Ontology Languages
– Designed to define ontologies
– They are sometimes called:
• Lightweight ontology languages
• Web-based ontology languages
• Markup ontology languages
– RDF (Resource Description Language)
– OWL (Web Ontology Language)

28
How Will the Semantic Web Work?
• Web Services
– Web services will be greatly improved if
semantics is added to the present Web
resources
– Computer will be able to:
• Make doctor appointments
• Synchronize with our agenda
• Find new suppliers for products we consume
• Make travel arrangements

29
How Will the Semantic Web Work?
• Applications of Semantic Web
– Personal Agent in Semantic Web
• Responsible for capturing user preferences, searching
for information on available resources, etc. to provide
answer that meet a user’s query
– Semantic desktop application
– Ontology applications in Art
• Cataloguing online cultural heritage or online museums
– The Hermitage Museum Web site
www.hermitagemuseum.org

30
 The semantic web:
some definitions

• The Semantic Web is not a separate Web but an extension of the

current one, in which information is given well-defined meaning,
better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation
(Berners-Lee, Hendlers, J. & Lassila, O., 2001)
• “The Semantic Web is a vision: the idea of having data on the Web
defined and linked in a way that it can be used by machines not just
for display purposes, but for automation, integration and reuse of
data across various applications (W3C, 2003)
• “Soon it will be possible to access the Web resources by content
rather than just by keywords (Anutariya et al, 2001)
 The semantic web (SW): definitions
• “The Semantic Web is a vision: the idea of having
data on the Web defined and linked in a way that it
can be used by machines not just for display
purposes, but for automation, integration and reuse
of data across various applications (W3C, 2003)
• “Soon it will be possible to access the Web resources
by content rather than just by keywords (Anutariya et
al, 2001)
 Semantic Web: Introduction
• The content of the present Word Wide Web is
nowadays only accessible and can be elaborated only
by people
• The Semantic Web is an enlargement of the WWW
with semantic information that can be used by
computers
• With the help of semantic information the content of
pages could be processed automatically and
computers could make inferences about a search
 The semantic web: characteristics
• The semantic web is not different from the www, is
actually a developing part of it.
• The infrastructures and characteristics should be
common
– Use URI (Uniform resource Identifiers) addressing
– Use protocols that a have a small and universally
understood set of commands (like HTTP: Hypertext
Transfer Protocol)
– Be decentralized (like the www)
– Function on a large scale
The semantic web: The layer cake
 What is Ontology? (1)

An ontology is "the specification of conceptualizations, used to help programs and

humans share knowledge."

An ontology is a set of concepts - such as things, events, and relations that are
specified in some way in order to create an agreed-upon vocabulary for exchanging
information. (Tom Gruber, an AI specialist at Stanford University.)

Ontologies establish a joint terminology between members of a community of interest.

These members can be human or automated agents.
 What is Ontology? (2)

• In information management and knowledge sharing arena, ontology

can be defined as follows:

– An ontology is a vocabulary of concepts and relations rich enough to enable us

to express knowledge and intention without semantic ambiguity.

– Ontology describes domain knowledge and provides an agreed-upon

understanding of a domain.

– Ontologies: are collections of statements written in a language such as RDF

that define the relations between concepts and specify logical rules for
reasoning about them.
• Computers will "understand" the meaning of semantic data on a web page by
following links to specified ontologies.
 What is Ontology?(3)
A more formal definition is:

“An ontology is a formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualization” (Tom Gruber)

– “explicit” means that “the type of concepts used and the constraints on their use are
explicitly defined”;
– “formal” refers to the fact that “it should be machine readable”;
– “shared” refers to the fact that the knowledge represented in an ontology are agreed
upon and accepted by a group”;
– “conceptualization” refers to an abstract model that consists the relevant concepts and
the relationships that exists in a certain situation

The basis of ontology is CONCEPTUALIZATION. Consider the following:

The conceptualization consists of

- the identified concepts (objects, events, beliefs, etc)
- E.g. Concepts: disease, symptoms, therapy
- the conceptual relationships that are assumed to exist and to be relevant.
- E.g. Relationships: “disease causes symptoms”, “therapy treats disease”
 World without ontology = Ambiguity
Example (1)
Ambiguity for computer
Rice?
–International Rice Research Institute
–Rice Research Program
–Rice Carrier Service Center
–Africa Rice Center
–Rice University

Cook?
You mean
–chef
–information about how to cook something,
–or simply a place, person, business or some other entity with "cook" in its name.

The problem is that the word “rice“ or “cook” has no meaning, or semantic content, to the
computer.
 World without ontology = Ambiguity
Example (2)

Ambiguity for humans

Cat
The Vet and Grand ma associate different view for the concept cat.
 Motivation (1)

The reason for ontologies becoming so important is that currently we

lack standards (shared knowledge) which are rich in semantics and
represented in machine understandable form.
Ying Ding, Ontoweb

Ontologies have been proposed to solve the problems that arise from
using different terminology to refer to the same concept or using the
same term to refer to different concepts.
Howard Beck and Helena Sofia Pinto
 Motivation (2)

•Inability to use the abundant information resources on the web

The WEB has tremendous collection of useful information however getting information from the web is
difficult.
Search engines are restricted to simple keyword based techniques. Interpretation of information
contained in web documents is left to the human user.

•Difficulty in Information Integration

The integration of data from various sources is a challenging task because of synonyms and
homonyms.

•Problem in Knowledge Management

Multi-actor scenario involved in distributed information production and management.
“People as well as machines can‘t share knowledge if they do not speak a common language
[T. Davenport]

Ontologies provide the required conceptualizations and knowledge representation to meet

these challenges.
 Motivation (3)

•Database-style queries are effective

– Find red cars, 1993 or newer, < $5,000

• Select * From Car Where Color=“red” And Year >= 1993 And Price < 5000

•Web is not a database

– Uses keyword search
– Retrieves documents, not records

Ontologies provide the required knowledge and representation to search the web in a database fashion
through implicit Boolean search.
What do ontologies look like?
 Example: Car-Ad Ontology

Year Price
1..* 1..*

Make 1..* has

has
has Mileage Car [0:1] has Year [1:*];
0..1 0..1 0..1
has
1..* Year {regexp[2]: “\d{2} : \b’\d{2}\b, … };
Car 0..1 Car [0:1] has Make [1:*];
has Make {regexp[10]: “\bchev\b”, “\bchevy\b”, … };
0..1 0..1
0..* PhoneNr Car [0:1] has Model [1:*];
is for 1..*
Model 1..* has Model {…};
0..1
has Car [0:1] has Mileage [1:*];
1..* Mileage {regexp[8] “\b[1-9]\d{1,2}k”,
1..*
“1-9]\d?,\d{3} : [^\$\d][1-9]\d?,\d{3}[^\d]” }
Feature
Extension {context: “\bmiles\b”, “\bmi\.”, “\bmi\b”};
Car [0:*] has Feature [1:*];
Feature {regexp[20]:
-- Colors
“\baqua\s+metallic\b”, “\bbeige\b”, …
Graphical
-- Transmission
“(5|6)\s*spd\b”, “auto : \bauto(\.|,)”,
-- Accessories
“\broof\s+rack\b”, “\bspoiler\b”, …
...

Textual
 Benefits of Ontology
• To facilitate communications among people and organisations
 aid to human communication and shared understanding by specifying meaning

• To facilitate communications among systems with out semantic ambiguity. i,e to achieve
inter-operability

• To provide foundations to build other ontologies (reuse)

• To save time and effort in building similar knowledge systems (sharing)

• To make domain assumptions explicit

 Ontological analysis
 clarifies the structure of knowledge
 allow domain knowledge to be explicitly defined and described
 Application Areas of Ontologies
• Information Retrieval
 As a tool for intelligent search through inference mechanism instead of keyword matching
 Easy retrievability of information without using complicated Boolean logic
 Cross Language Information Retrieval
 Improve recall by query expansion through the synonymy relations
 Improve precision through Word Sense Disambiguation (identification of the relevant meaning of a
word in a given context among all its possible meanings)
• Digital Libraries
 Building dynamical catalogues from machine readable meta data
 Automatic indexing and annotation of web pages or documents with meaning
 To give context based organisation (semantic clustering) of information resources
 Site organization and navigational support
• Information Integration
 Seamless integration of information from different websites and databases
• Knowledge Engineering and Management
 As a knowledge management tools for selective semantic access (meaning oriented access)
 Guided discovery of knowledge
• Natural Language Processing
 Better machine translation
 Queries using natural language
 Types of Ontologies
Ontologeis can be classfied according to the degree of conceptualization

• Top-level ontologies
• describes very general notions which are independent of a particular problem or domain
• are applicable across domains and includes vocabulary related to things, events, time, space, etc

• Domain ontologies
• knowledge represented in this kind of ontologies is specific to a particular domain such as forestry,
fishery, etc.
• They provide vocabularies about concepts in a domain and their relationships or about the theories
governing the domain.

• Application or task ontologies

• describe knowledge pieces depending both on a particular domain and task.
• Therefore, they are related to problem solving methods.
 Complexity of Ontologies

Depending on the wide range of tasks to which the ontologies are put ontologies can vary in their
complexity

Ontologies range from simple taxonomies to highly tangled networks including constraints associated
with concepts and relations.

•Light-weight Ontology
• concepts
• ‘is-a’ hierarchy among concepts
• relations between concepts

•Heavy-weight Ontology
• cardinality constraints
• taxonomy of relations
• Axioms (restrictions)
 Thesauri and Ontology
Similarities

• Both serve the same purpose, namely to provide a shared conceptualisation about a specific
part of the world to different users in order to facilitate an efficient communication of complex
knowledge.

• Both disciplines are based on concept systems representing highly complex knowledge
independent of any language.

• Both are concerned about covering a broad range of terminology used in a particular domain,
and in understanding the relationships among these terms.

• Both utilize a hierarchical organization to group terms into categories and subcategories.

• Both can be applied to cataloguing and organizing information.

 Thesauri and Ontology
Differences
• Formality of the definition:
– Thesauri uses text in natural language to define the meaning of terms. The correct
interpretation of the intended meaning depends on the user.
– Ontologies specify conceptual knowledge explicitly using a formal language with clear
semantics, which allows an unambiguous interpretation of terms.
• Computational support:
– The available tools are quite different for thesauri and ontologies.
– Most thesauri maintenance tools provide limited or no means for an explicit
representation of knowledge.
– Ontology maintenance tools provide systems with powerful knowledge representation
languages and inference mechanisms that allow formal consistency checks, inference of
new knowledge, and a more user-friendly interaction.
• Users:
– Thesauri are intended for human users, where domain experts constitute the major user
group.
– Ontologies are mainly developed for knowledge sharing between (both human and
artificial) agents.
 Reasons to evolve thesauri to ontologies

• Little possibility of re-use due to inherent semantic ambiguity and lack of the explicitness of
their semantics .

• Difficulties in the diversity of their representational form (no common representational

language)

• Developed for human use. They lack of expressive mechanisms to represent, maintain, and
reason about complex knowledge in an explicit form- interpretation is left for humans.

(Source:http://www.xmluk.org/slides/magic-circle_2002/wilson/XML_UK_SW_Thes/all.htm)
 Problems with Thesaurus Modelling
BT/NT relations-AGROVOC

Thesauri have not been constructed with purely defined semantics. It is common for BT/NT
relations within a thesauri to include at least: • MAIZE
•   NT dent maize
  NT flint maize
•subtype of (e.g. soil/ subsoil)   NT popcorn
  NT soft maize
•instance (e.g. Development Agency/IDRC))   NT sweet corn
  NT waxy maize
 
•part of (e.g. soil/top soil) • SOIL
•
•role (e.g. Development Agency/Voluntary agency) NT top soil
NT subsoil
•property of (e.g. maize/sweet corn)
• Development Agencies
• NT development banks
NT voluntary agencies
NT IDRC
 Problems with Thesaurus Modelling
Equivalence relations – UF, USE

• •DEVELOPMENT AGENCIES
UF/USE - between the descriptor and the non-descriptor (s).
• UF aid institutions 1
• Associative relationship can represent:
1-–Similar but not necessarily identical concept
genuine synonymy, or identical meanings;
– near- synonymy, or similar meanings;
– In some thesaurus, antonym, or opposite meanings; ( eg. Eurovoc)
 Problems with Thesaurus Modelling
Associative relations- RT

The RT associative relation is more even open to interpretation than the hierarchical relation
For some thesaurus, it can contain:
– cause and effect
– agency or instrument
– hierarchy - where polyhierarchy has not been allowed the missing hierarchical relationships are
replaced by associative relationships
– sequence in time or space
– constituent elements
– characteristic feature
– object of an action, process or discipline
– location
– similarity (in cases where two near-synonyms have been included as descriptors)
– antonym
 RT in AGROVOC

•1- cause
Degradation
and effect
2- characteristic feature
•3- location
RT chemical reactions1
RT discoloration
RT hydrolysis
RT shrinkage

• MAIZE
• RT corn flour
RT corn starch 2
RT zea mays

• IDRC
• BT development agencies
RT canada 3
 Thesauri and Ontology
how to migrate

• Analyze the existing relations and establish semantically meaningful relations:

– BT/NT => ‘Is-A’ relation

– RT => analyzed to roles/properties/attributes

(like “produces”, “used by”, “made for”).

• Allow for machine-processable definitions:

– Fencing sword = sword used for: fencing”

– Weapon = object used for: fighting or hunting

– Mother = human & female & which has born: human

 Things to keep in mind....

• There is no one correct way to model a domain

– Modeling the required knowledge heavily relies on to what purpose the ontology will be
used.

• Ontology development is a collaborative process

– Knowledge captured in the ontology should be derived from consensus. This will ensure
reuse and share-ability.

• Ontology works in a network fashion

– No single ontology but networks of ontologies

• Ontology development is necessarily a dynamic and iterative

process
– Ontologies should evolve through time
 Conclusion

• Ontology provides better semantic representation and machine understandable

representation of knowledge.

• Ontologies are natural successors of thesauri particular for information retrieval and
knowledge management.

• Developing thesauri to ontologies requires increased precision of the semantics of the

existing relations in thesauri.

• Ontology repositories will be distributed on the Web

– methods and tools for accessing/reusing/aligning ontology's are needed.
 Ontology: definitions

Ontology comes from:

Ontos (greek)= Being + Logos=Word
Gruber (1993):
“An ontology is a formal explicit specification of a shared
conceptualization” Should be machine
readable

A abstract model

WC3-consortium
“Ontology is a term borrowed from philosophy that refers to
the science of describing the kinds of entities in the world and
how they are related “
 Ontologies and Ontology Representations
• “Ontology” – a word borrowed from philosophy
• – But we are necessarily building logical systems
• • “Physical symbol systems”
• – Simon, H. A. (1969, 1981). The Sciences of the Artificial, MIT Press
• • “Concepts” and “Ontologies”/ “conceptualisations” in their
• original sense are psychosocial phenomena
• – We don’t really understand them
• • “Concept representations” and “Ontology representations” are
• engineering artefacts
• – At best approximations of our real concepts and conceptualisations
• (ontologies)
• • And we don’t even quite understand what we are approximating
 What Is An Ontology?
• Word borrowed by computing for the
• explicit description of the conceptualisation of a domain:
• – concepts
• – properties and attributes of concepts
• – constraints on properties and attributes
• – Individuals (often, but not always)
• • An ontology defines
• – a common vocabulary
• – a shared understanding
 Ontology
– Ontology categorizes concepts (which are defined by a set of
common properties) into classes based on common
characteristics

– Ontology is the representation of the knowledge of a

domain where a set of objects and their relationships is
described by a vocabulary.

– Ontologies should provide descriptions for

• Classes (things) in the various domains
• Relationships among things
• Properties of these things
 Ontology

– Ontologies should satisfy certain demands:

• Expressivity: domains should be described
• Consistency: it should not give contradictory information
• It should support reasoning processes

– Ontologies are useful in sharing and exchanging

information between software agents
• Ontologies do not necessarily reflect the human way of thinking of
how knowledge is classified
• Ontologies should therefore not be seen as a reflection of human
intelligence
 Ontology vs Taxonomy
• Taxonomy
• Is a classification of terms in form of a hierarchy using
typically a father-son relationship (i.e. Type of)
• Example The taxonomy of the leaving beings
Kingdom: Animalia
Filo: Chordata
Subfilo: Vertebrata
……
 Light and Heavy expressivity

Lightweight Heavyweight
• Concepts, atomic types • Metaclasses
• Is-a hierarchy • Type constraints on
• Relationships between relations
Concepts • Cardinality constraints
• Taxonomy of relations
• Reified statements
• Axioms
• Semantic entailments
• Expressiveness
• Inference systems
A simple ontology: Animals
 Why Develop an Ontology?

• • To share common understanding of the structure

• of descriptive information
• – among people
• – among software agents
• – between people and software
• • To enable reuse of domain knowledge
• – to avoid “re-inventing the wheel”
• – to introduce standards to allow interoperability
 Why build an ontology

• • Interworking and information sharing

• – Providing a well organised controlled vocabulary
• • Indexing complex information
• – “Knowledge is fractal”
• • Ontologies are fractal
• – Self similar structure at every level of granularity (detail)
• • Combat combinatorial explosions
• – The exploding bicycle
• • “Conceptual Lego”
• – A “dictionary and grammar” instead of a “phrasebook”
 Ontology as Taxonomy
Taxonomy is a classification system where each node has only one
parent – simple ontology
Living Beings

Animals Plants

Vertebrates Invertebrates
Ontology of People and their Roles
Typically, we want a richer ontology with more relationships
between concepts:
Employee Contractor

Manager Expert Analyst

advises

Programme Mgr Project Mgr

funds
 Structure of an Ontology
Ontologies typically have two distinct components:
• Names for important concepts and relationships in the domain
– Elephant is a concept whose members are a kind of animal
– Herbivore is a concept whose members are exactly those
animals who eat only plants or parts of plants
• Background knowledge/constraints on the domain
– Adult_Elephants weigh at least 2,000 kg
– No individual can be both a Herbivore and a Carnivore
 Why develop an ontology?
• To define web resources more precisely and make them
more amenable to machine processing
• To make domain assumptions explicit
– Easier to change domain assumptions
– Easier to understand and update legacy data
• To separate domain knowledge from operational knowledge
– Re-use domain and operational knowledge separately
• A community reference for applications
• To share a consistent understanding of what information
means
 Types of Ontologies [Guarino, 98]

Describe very general concepts like space, time, event, which

are independent of a particular problem or domain. It seems
reasonable to have unified top-level ontologies for large
communities of users.

Describe the
vocabulary related
to a generic Describe the
domain by vocabulary
specializing the related to a
concepts generic task or
introduced in the activity by
top-level ontology. specializing the
top-level
ontologies.

These are the most specific ontologies. Concepts in application

ontologies often correspond to roles played by domain entities
while performing a certain activity.
 Ontology Examples

• • Taxonomies on the Web

• – Yahoo! categories
• • Catalogs for on-line shopping
• – Amazon.com product catalog
• • Dublin Core and other standards for the Web
• • Domain independent examples
• – Ontoclean
• – Sumo
 Web Ontology Languages
• They are designed to define ontologies
• They are based on RDF and RDF-schema
– SHOE
– Oil (Ontology inference Layer)
• OWL (Web Ontology Language)
http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-features/
– It is an ontology description language
– It is a standard language for the modeling of ontologies
– Facilitates the interpretability of the Web content (more
than XML or RDF)
– Less complex than RDF-schema
– Has additional vocabulary based on description logic
 OWL 1
• Describes classes, properties and relations to facilitate
machine interpretability of the Web content

• Owl is defined as a vocabulary (like RDF) but is

semantically richer

• In OWL classes of entities can be specified in different

ways, for example:
– Which individuals belong to a specific class
– Which qualities should have the elements that belong to
that class
– If individuals belong to a particular underclass
 OWL 2
• It is possible to limit a membership in a subclass
• With RDF-schema it is possible to produce
subclasses
 OWL: example 1
• Definition of “name”

• Properties, classes and things are distinguished

• Things can be summarized in classes
 OWL: example 2
• Definition of “marine mammal”

• Precise definition of classes: How many subclasses are there?

 OWL: example 2
• What is dolphin?

• A class is defined like a cross-section of two classes