OntoMap – the Guide to the Upper-Level.pdf

OntoMap – the Guide to the Upper-Level Atanas K. Kiryakov, Marin Dimitrov OntoText Lab., Sirma AI EOOD Chr. Botev 38A, 1000 Sofia, Bulgaria, {naso,marin}@sirma.bg Kiril Iv. Simov Linguistic Modelling Laboratory, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences Akad. G. Bontchev Str. 25A, 1113 Sofia, Bulgaria, kivs@bgcict.acad.bg Abstract. The upper-level ontologies are theories that capture the most common con- cepts, which are relevant for many of the tasks involving knowledge extraction, repre- sentation, and reasoning. These ontologies use to represent the skeleton of the human common-sense in such a formal way that covers as much aspects (or ”dimensions”) of the knowledge as possible. Often the result is relatively complex and abstract philo- sophic theory. Currently the evaluation of the feasibility of such ontologies is pretty expensive mostly because of technical problems such as different representations and terminolo- gies used. Additionally, there are no formal mappings between the upper-level ontolo- gies that could make easier their understanding, study, and comparison. As a result, the upper-level models are not widely used. We present OntoMap — a project with the pragmatic goal to facilitate an easy access, understanding, and reuse of such resources in order to make them useful for experts outside the ontology/knowledge engineering community. A semantic framework on the so called conceptual level that is small and easy enough to be learned on-the-fly is designed and used for representation. Technically OntoMap is a web-site () that provides access to upper-level ontologies and hand-crafted mappings between them. Currently it supports just on- line browsing and DAML+OIL export. The next step will be to provide the resources in various formats, including an application server giving an uniform access to the resources via OKBC. This way OntoMap will become part of the semantic web, i.e. machine-understandable rather than just human-readable. 1 Introduction The structure of