Modularizing OWL Ontologies.pptVIP

6/27/05 Modularizing OWL Ontologies Bernardo Cuenca Grau, Bijan Parsia, Evren Sirin and Aditya Kalyanpur University of Maryland, College Park Multiplicity in Web ontologies Key features of the Web Mostly global identifers URIs/IRIs Identifer-based information manipulation HTTP GET and POST/PUT Distributed representations - Representations are (somewhat) modular Progressive disclosure and graceful degradation How do we get these things into OWL? URIs in OWL Ontologies Three key modalities of URI use URIs as data (mention) URIs as identifiers (use) URIs as values of owl:imports (use++) owl:imports supports transclusion The transclusion is flat I.e., an include; imported axioms just asserted HTML has these modalities owl:imports Problems with owl:imports Does not support information hiding or filtering None of the imported axioms retain their context. No effective difference between ``copying and pasting’’ locally the imported ontology. OWL gives us either ALL or NOTHING owl:imports(2) Without inclusion, nothing gets in There are (conditional) effects: If you import or merge, “same” URIs get merged With inclusion, everything gets in Even things which are intuitively irrelevant NCI: You want Gene, you also get Belief System The resulting ontology’s logic gets complex The resulting ontology itself is very complex Modularity in Web Ontologies Knowledge sharing and re-use crucial research issues. Modularity, worthy the name, should provide advantages in the following aspects: Maintenance and Evolution Understandability for Humans Knowledge Re-use and sharing Processability E-Connections: The Basics An E-Connection is a knowledge representation language defined as a combination of other logical formalisms. E-connections: Combined KBs A Combined KB is a set of ontologies written in the language of an E-Connection Each component ontology can be written in any of the component logics Each component ontology is interpreted in a different logical context E-connections: