Colloquium Details
Ontology Translation on the Semantic Web
| Author: | Dejing Dou Yale University |
|---|---|
| Date: | April 30, 2004 |
| Time: | 15:30 |
| Location: | 220 Deschutes |
Note: Special Time
Abstract
Ontologies as means for formally specifying the vocabulary and relationship of concepts are seen playing a key role on the Semantic Web, where web-based agents can process and "understand" data rather than merely display them at present. However, the distributed nature of the Web allows web-based agents use different ontologies to describe their data. Ontology translation is one of the most difficult problems that agents must cope with when they share information.
We considered ontology translation problems in three scenarios: deductive dataset translation, ontology extension generation and query handling through different ontologies. Our new approach is ontology translation by ontology merging and automated reasoning. The merge of two ontologies can be obtained by adding bridging axioms to express the mappings between their concepts. An inference engine, OntoEngine, was built to implement semantic translation in either forward or backward chaining way. OntoEngine can deal with skolem terms and equality substitution. Our internal representation, Web-PDDL, is a strongly typed first order logic language to describe ontologies, datasets and queries for the Semantic Web.
Recently, we began cooperating with Yale medical informatics center to apply our approach to integrate different web-based neuronal databases. We are also developing some semi-automatic tools to help domain experts, such as neuroscientists, to map and merge different ontologies or database schemas on their domains.
Biography
Dejing Dou is a PhD candidate with Prof. Drew McDermott at Yale computer science department. His interests lie in artificial intelligence, databases and the Web. Specifically, his work has focused on ontology integration and ontology translation for the Semantic Web, web-based agents and web-based databases. His current work involves data semantics and data integration for medical informatics and bioinformatics.
Dejing Dou received his B.E. degree at Tsinghua University, China and M.S. degree at Yale University.