Skip to main content

Conceptual Modeling for Distributed Ontology Environments

  • Conference paper
Conceptual Structures: Logical, Linguistic, and Computational Issues (ICCS 2000)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 1867))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

As ontologies become common in more applications and as those applications become larger and longer-lived, it is becoming increasingly common for ontologies to be developed in distributed environments by authors with disparate backgrounds. Ontologies that are expected to be collaboratively created and maintained over time by authors in many locations present special challenges to the problem of conceptual modeling. In this paper, we will discuss conceptual modeling issues and focus on those topics with elevated importance in distributed environments. We will draw on our experience creating and maintaining ontologies in differing knowledge representation and reasoning environments over the last decade. Many of our recent observations are drawn from our experiences in the DARPA High Performance Knowledge Base Program. This program generated dozens of knowledge bases authored by people of varying expertise in both knowledge representation and reasoning as well as domain experience. Our efforts in merging the ontologies, loading them for coordinated use, and modifying them to meet evolving needs shape much of the material in this paper. Additional sources of observations are from designing and building a number of e-commerce ontologies (with content merged from multiple sources) and also from a few families of description logic applications including the PROSE/QUESTAR family of configurators and the FindUR knowledge-enhanced search applications.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 84.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Baader, F., Borgida, A., Kuesters, R., McGuinness, D.L.: Matching in Description Logics. Journal of Logic and Computation — Special Issue on Description Logics  9(3) (June 1999)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Borgida, A., McGuinness, D.L.: Inquiring about Frames. In: Proceedings of Fifth International Conference on the Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco (1996), Also appears in Proceedings of International Workshop on Description Logics, Cambridge, Mass. (November 1996)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Borgida, A., Franconi, E., Horrocks, I., McGuinness, D.L., Schneider, P.P.: Explaining ALC subsumption. In: Proceedings of the International Workshop on Description Logics - DL 1999, Linköping, Sweden, July 1999, pp. 33–36 (1999)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Brachman, R.J., Selfridge, P.G., Terveen, L.G., Altman, B., Borgida, A., Halper, F., Kirk, T., Lazar, A., McGuinness, D.L., Resnick, L.A.: Knowledge Representation Support for Data Archaeology. In: Proceedings of the First International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (November 1992)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Brachman, R.J., Borgida, A., McGuinness, D.L., Patel-Schneider, P.F., Resnick, L.A.: Living with CLASSIC: When and How to Use a KL-ONE-Like Language. In: Sowa, J. (ed.) Principles of Semantic Networks: Explorations in the representation of knowledge, pp. 401–456. Morgan Kaufmann, San Mateo (1991)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Brickley, Guha (eds.): Resource Description Framework (RDF) Schema Specification 1.0 W3C Candidate Recommendations (March 2000), http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/CR-rdfschema-20000327/

  7. Chaudhri, V.K., Farquhar, A., Fikes, R., Karp, P.D., Rice, J̇.P.: OKBC: A Programmatic Foundation for Knowledge Base Interoperability. In: Proceedings of the Fifteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Madison, Wisconsin, July 26-30 (1998); Also KSL Technical Report KSL-98-08

    Google Scholar 

  8. Cohen, P.R., Schrag, R., Jones, E., Pease, A., Lin, A., Starr, B., Easter, D., Gunning, D., Burke, M.: The DARPA High Performance Knowledge Bases Project. Artificial Intelligence Magazine 19(4), 25–49 (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  9. DMOZ – Open Directory Projects, http://www.dmoz.org

  10. Eriksson, H., Fergerson, R.W., Shahar, Y., Musen, M.A.: Automatic Generation of Ontology. In: Banff, T. (ed.) Knowledge Acquisition for Knowledge-based systems Workshop, Banff, Alberta, Canada (1999)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Farquhar, A., Fikes, R., Rice, J.: The Ontolingua Server: a Tool for Collaborative Ontology Construction. In: Gaines, B. (ed.) Proceedings of Knowledge Acquisition Workshop, Banff, Canada (1996)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Noy, N.F., Musen, M.A.: SMART: Automated Support for Ontology Merging and Alignment. In: The Proceedings of the Twelfth Workshop on Knowledge Acquisition, Modeling and Management, Banff, Canada (1999), Available as SMI technical report SMI- 1999-0813

    Google Scholar 

  13. Genesereth, M.R., Fikes, R.: Knowledge Interchange Format, Version 3.0 Reference Manual. Knowledge Systems Laboratory, KSL-92-86 (1992)

    Google Scholar 

  14. MacGregor, R., McGuinness, D.L.: DARPA’s High Performance Knowledge Base (HPKB) Program. In: Proceedings of the International Workshop on Description Logics - DL 1999, Linköping, Sweden (July 1999)

    Google Scholar 

  15. McGuinness, D.L.: Ontology-enhanced Search for Primary Care Medical Literature. In: The Proceedings of the International Medical Informatics Association Working Group 6-Medical Concept Representation and Natural Language Processing Conference, Phoenix, Arizona, December 16–19 (1999)

    Google Scholar 

  16. McGuinness, D.L.: Ontologies for Electronic Commerce. In: Proceedings of the AAAI 1999 Artificial Intelligence for Electronic Commerce Workshop, Orlando, Florida (July 1999)

    Google Scholar 

  17. McGuinness, D.L.: Ontological Issues for Knowledge-Enhanced Search. In: The Proceedings of Formal Ontology in Information Systems (June 1998); Also published in Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications. IOS Press. Washington (1998), Available from http://www.research.att.com/~dlm/findur

  18. McGuinness, D.L.: Explaining Reasoning in Description Logics. Ph.D. Thesis, Rutgers University, Technical Report LCSR-TR-277 (1996)

    Google Scholar 

  19. McGuinness, D.L., Borgida, A.: Explaining Subsumption in Description Logics. In: Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Montreal, Canada (August 1995)

    Google Scholar 

  20. McGuinness, D.L., Fikes, R., Rice, J., Wilder, S.: An Environment for Merging and Testing Large Ontologies. In: The Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR 2000), Breckenridge, Colorado, USA, April 12-15 (2000), Available from http://www.ksl.stanford.edu/software/chimaera

  21. McGuinness, D.L., Fikes, R., Rice, J., Wilder, S.: The Chimaera Ontology Environment. To appear in the Proceedings of the The Seventeenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2000), Austin, Texas, July 30 - August 3 (2000)

    Google Scholar 

  22. McGuinness, D.L., Patel-Schneider, P.F.: Usability Issues in Knowledge Representation Systems. In: Proceedings of the Fifteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Madison, Wisconsin (July 1998); This is an updated version of Usability Issues in Description Logic Systems. Published in Proceedings of International Workshop on Description Logics, Gif sur Yvette, Paris, France (September 1997)

    Google Scholar 

  23. McGuinness, D.L., Resnick, L.A., Isbell, C.: Description Logic in Practice: A CLASSIC: Application. In: Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Montreal, Canada (August 1995)

    Google Scholar 

  24. McGuinness, D.L., Wright, J.R.: Conceptual Modeling for Configuration: A Description Logic-based Approach. The Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis, and Manufacturing Journal – Special issue on Configuration (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  25. McGuinness, D.L., Wright, J.R.: An Industrial Strength Description Logicbased Configurator Platform. IEEE Intelligent Systems 13(4), 69–77 (1998)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  26. Oliver, D.: Change Management for Shared and Locally Divergent Healthcare Terminologies. In: The Proceedings of the International Medical Informatics Association Working Group 6- Medical Concept Representation and Natural Language Processing Conference, Phoenix, Arizona, December 16–19 (1999)

    Google Scholar 

  27. Swartout, B., Patil, R., Knight, K., Russ, T.: Toward Distributed Use of Large-Scale Ontologies. In: Proceedings of the Tenth Knowledge Acquisition for Knowledge- based Systems Workshop, Banff, Alberta, Canada, November 9-14 (1996)

    Google Scholar 

  28. Vizine-Goetz, D., Mitchell, J.S.: Dewey 2000. Annual Review of OCLC Research, pp. 16–19. OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc., Dublin (July 1996), Available at: http://www.oclc.org/oclc/research/publications/review95/part1/vizine.html

  29. Wright, J.R., Weixelbaum, E.S., Brown, K., Vesonder, G.T., Palmer, S.R., Berman, J.I., Moore, H.H.: A knowledge-based configurator that supports sales, engineering, and manufacturing at AT&T network systems. In: Proceedings of the Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference, pp. 183–193 (1993)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2000 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

McGuinness, D.L. (2000). Conceptual Modeling for Distributed Ontology Environments. In: Ganter, B., Mineau, G.W. (eds) Conceptual Structures: Logical, Linguistic, and Computational Issues. ICCS 2000. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 1867. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/10722280_7

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/10722280_7

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-67859-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-44663-7

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

Publish with us

Policies and ethics