Publication Date
2015
Document Type
Dissertation
Committee Members
Pascal Hitzler (Advisor), Krzysztof Janowicz (Committee Member), Prabhaker Mateti (Committee Member), Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan (Committee Member)
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Abstract
Ontology alignment plays a key role in enabling interoperability among various data sources present in the web. The nature of the world is such, that the same concepts differ in meaning, often so slightly, which makes it difficult to relate these concepts. It is the omni-present heterogeneity that is at the core of the web. The research work presented in this dissertation, is driven by the goal of providing a robust ontology alignment language for the semantic web, as we show that description logics based alignment languages are not suitable for aligning ontologies.
The adoption of the semantic web technologies has been consistently on the rise over the past decade, and it continues to show promise. The core component of the semantic web is the set of knowledge representation languages -- mainly the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) standards Web Ontology Language (OWL), Resource Description Framework (RDF), and Rule Interchange Format (RIF). While these languages have been designed in order to be suitable for the openness and extensibility of the web, they lack certain features which we try to address in this dissertation. One such missing component is the lack of non-monotonic features, in the knowledge representation languages, that enable us to perform common sense reasoning.
For example, OWL supports the open world assumption (OWA), which means that knowledge about everything is assumed to be possibly incomplete at any point of time. However, experience has shown that there are situations that require us to assume that certain parts of the knowledge base are complete. Employing the Closed World Assumption (CWA) helps us achieve this. Circumscription is a very well-known approach towards CWA, which provides closed world semantics by employing the idea of minimal models with respect to certain predicates which are closed. We provide the formal semantics of the notion of Grounded Circumscription, which is an extension of circumscription with desirable properties like decidability. We also provide a tableaux calculus to reason over knowledge bases under the notion of grounded circumscription. Another form of common sense logic, is default logic. Default logic provides a way to specify rules that, by default, hold in most cases but not necessarily in all cases. The classic example of such a rule is: If something is a bird then it flies. The power of defaults comes from the ability of the logic to handle exceptions to the default rules. For example, a bird will be assumed to fly by default unless it is an exception, i.e. it belongs to a class of birds that do not fly, like penguins. Interestingly, this property of defaults can be utilized to create mappings between concepts of different ontologies (knowledge bases). We provide a new semantics for the integration of defaults in description logics and show that it improves upon previously known results in literature. In this study, we give various examples to show the utility and advantages of using a default logic based ontology alignment language. We provide the semantics and decidability results of a default based mapping language for tractable fragments of description logics (or OWL). Furthermore, we provide a proof of concept system and qualitative analysis of the results obtained from the system when compared to that of traditional mapping repair techniques.
Page Count
151
Department or Program
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Year Degree Awarded
2015
Copyright
Copyright 2015, some rights reserved. My ETD may be copied and distributed only for non-commercial purposes and may not be modified. All use must give me credit as the original author.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
