Leveraging Dynamic Inheritance in Complex Ontology Representation

abstract

Real life ontologies for web based systems, such as B2B, P2P, and B2C applications, are usually complex and large, and generally contain numerous intricate rules, exceptions and integrity constraints. Representing such ontologies in a concise but effective manner warrants sophisticated and higher level abstractions. In this paper we present an object-oriented approach to ontology representation and show that inheritance can be exploited to model and represent complex ontologies. For this purpose, we extend XML to include inheritance and methods, and demonstrate that such an extended XML actually help design and represent better ontologies that are modular, concise and low in maintenance overhead. The figure below shows an example of a complex ontology represented using our proposed XML extension. A complete discussion on XML⁺⁺ and and its use in ontology representation may be found in an extended version of this paper in [1].