Colloquium Details
Description Logics, Ontologies and the Semantic Web
| Author: | Jeff Z. Pan School of Computer Science, The University of Manchester, UK |
|---|---|
| Date: | May 02, 2005 |
| Time: | 15:30 |
| Location: | 220 Deschutes |
Abstract
After a brief revision of the vision of the Semantic Web, I will illustrate why Description Logic-based ontologies play a key role in the Semantic Web. High quality ontologies are pivotal for the Semantic Web. Their construction, integration, and evolution crucially depend on the availability of a well-defined semantics and powerful reasoning tools. Description Logics address both these ontology needs. In this context, I will present the basic notions and key reasoning tasks of DLs. The first part will be concluded by a case study of DL in bioinformatics.
The second part of the talk introduces some recent research on DLs and ontology reasoning, including extending DLs with customised datatypes and datatype predicates as well as query answering in DLs. Both are highly motivated research topics. For the first one, it has been pointed out that many potential users will not adopt the DL-based Semantic Web standard ontology language OWL (DL) unless this it provides customised datatypes and datatype predicates. The second topic is interesting because it is crucial to allow users to retrieve data from their DL-based ontologies. Scalability is a big concern is the second topic.
Biography
Dr. Jeff Z. Pan is a research scientist of the Information Management Group in the School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester, UK. During 2000-2003, he was a Ph.D. student of Prof. Ian Horrocks, who has recently been awarded the 2005 Roger Needham Award from the British Computer Society. Jeff's main research interests lie in knowledge representation, ontologies and the Web. His work has focused on the design of logics and ontology languages, automated reasoning, in particular the development of reasoning techniques for the logics underpinning ontology languages, and the applications of all the above (such as in the Semantic Web).
Currently, Jeff is coordinating the "Semantic Web Language Extension" work package in the Knowledge Web project. He is a co-author of RDFS(FA) and an invited reviewer of the Semantic and Abstract Syntax of the OWL Web ontology language. He is a co-coordinator of the Software Engineering Task Force in the W3C Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment Working Group. His proposal on adding customised datatypes into OWL (DL) has been published in a W3C note, which addresses how to use XML Schema datatypes in RDF and OWL.