KWTR: ontology modularization

[edit] Contributors:

Oscar Corcho

• What is the state of the art of Semantic Web in your research field?

Work on ontology modularization has been done in different areas: ontology engineering aspects (focused on how to model ontologies in a modular way and how to reuse modules from existing ontologies when building one) and knowledge representation and reasoning aspects (how to build reasoners that can take advantage of the possibility of modularising ontologies in order to improve aspects like scalability and tractability).

Some of the current topics of interest in this area are (as extracted from the list of topics of the International Workshops on Ontology Modularisation that have been held in 2006 and 2007): Logical formalisms for Modular Ontologies, Sharing and reuse of ontology modules - linking and importing approaches, Identification and analysis of common scenarios for ontology integration or modularization, Methodologies for providing semantic guarantees on merged ontologies, Methodologies for extracting semantically meaningful modules from large ontologies, Selective information sharing between ontology modules, Requirements of modular ontology languages, Reconciling inconsistent ontology modules, Ontology language extensions to support modularity, and Modular ontology tools for collaborative ontology development

• Provide references and short abstracts of three papers you consider as significant in your research field.

On the knowledge representation and reasoning side: Just the Right Amount: Extracting Modules from Ontologies. Bernardo Cuenca Grau, Ian Horrocks, Yevgeny Kazakov, Ulrike Sattler. WWW2007.

On the ontology engineering side: The State of Multi-User Ontology Engineering. Julian Seidenberg, Alan Rector. 2nd Workshop on Ontology Modularisation (WoMo 2007).

• Please provide one or more examples (either business, or research, or both) in which semantic web has been used (if you can, add some references).

Ontology modularisation is being used in emerging collaborative ontology engineering efforts and in allowing reasoning with large ontologies like GALEN.

• Are there existing tools or demos? Please indicate some of them.

Tools are being made available by EU projects like TOnes (Thinking Ontologies, http://www.tonesproject.org/), and by groups like Alan Rector's group, and will be made available in next versions of Protégé.

• What are the open problems in your Semantic Web research field? Why?

Described above, as the list of topics of the international workshops on ontology modularisation.

• Provide references and links of the most relevant Semantic Web research projects in your field.

EU projects TOnes and NeOn. Protégé, in the context of the CO-ODE project

• What challenges try these projects to overcome?

The aforementioned problems.

• What are their foreseen benefits (both in market and scientific community)?

This will allow a better collaborative ontology development and will improve the ability of reasoners to deal with large ontologies.

• When, in your opinion, will projects’ results be ready for industry?

In a medium term (2-5 years)

• Do you think that it is important to invest (money and time) in these topics? Why?

Yes, this is a topic where investment is necessary in order to improve the current state of the art and to ensure that this technology can be transferred to industry.

• What are, in your opinion, the most relevant Semantic Web challenges that will be solved in the long term (10 years)? Why?

Reasoning with even larger ontologies and management of inconsistencies in the context of ontology engineering processes and for reasoning.