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Introduction
Leo Obrst is retired, formerly worked at MITRE. Leo's research interests are: Applied Ontology, Artificial Intelligence (Knowledge Representation, Automated Reasoning), Computational Linguistics, Semantics, Pragmatics, Philosophy (Metaphysics, Language, Science)
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August 1997 - present
Publications
Publications (66)
The objectives of this paper are (a) to motivate the adoption of semantic graphical models of threat relations and countermeasures in the design and operation of cyber‐physical systems (CPS), and (b) to raise awareness of the various benefits which systems security engineers (SSEs) stand to gain by adopting such practices. Specifically, we propose...
The role that ontologies play or can play in designing and employing semantic technologies has been widely acknowledged by the SemanticWeb and Linked Data communities. But the level of collaboration between these communities and the Applied Ontology community has been much less than expected. Also, ontologies and ontological techniques appear to be...
+++ UPDATED VERSION PUBLISHED IN APPLIED ONTOLOGY VOL.9, ISSUE 2, 2014+++
This version 1.0.0 (2014.04.29-10:45) of the OntologySummit2014_Communique was adopted by the community at the Ontology Summit 2014 Symposium (Arlington, Virginia, USA). It summarizes the activity of 4+ months of discussions of the Ontology Community (IAOA) and its collabora...
Currently, there is no agreed on methodology for development of ontologies, and there is no consensus on how ontologies should be evaluated. Consequently, evaluation techniques and tools are not widely utilized in the development of ontologies. This can lead to ontologies of poor quality and is an obstacle
to the successful deployment of ontologies...
We report on our research effort, called Fast Semantic Attribute-Role-Based Access Control (ARBAC), to develop a semantic platform-independent framework enabling information originators and security administrators to specify access rights to information consistently and completely, in a social network environment, and then to rigorously enforce tha...
The subject of metadata and ontology storage is broad, complex and rapidly evolving. This chapter aims to provide an overview of the kinds of technologies that are used for metadata and ontology storage as well as the methods, tools and standards for implementing those technologies. We also include a comparison matrix of metadata and ontology stora...
The Ontology Summit 2012 explored the current and potential uses of ontology, its methods and paradigms, in big systems and big data: How ontology can be used to design, develop, and operate such systems. The systems addressed were not just software systems, although software systems are typically core and necessary components, but more complex sys...
Purpose In this document, we give a high-level overview of selected Semantic (Web) technologies, methods, and other important considerations, that are relevant for the success of EarthCube. The goal of this initial document is to provide entry points and references for discussions between the Semantic Technologies experts and the domain experts wit...
This paper is an early report of our continuing effort to provide a platform-independent framework so that information originators and security administrators can specify access rights to information consistently and completely, and that this specification is then rigorously enforced. To accomplish this objective it is necessary to link a security...
The goal of the 2011 Ontology Summit was to assist in making the case for the use of ontology by providing concrete application examples, success/value metrics and advocacy strategies. This communiqué provides tips, guidelines and strategies for making the case for ontology to a variety of potential beneficiaries and future stakeholders. This commu...
This chapter describes the need for complex semantic models, i.e., ontologies of real-world categories, referents, and instances, to go beyond the barriers of terminology and data structures. Terms and local data structures are often tolerated in information technology because these are simpler, provide structures that humans can seemingly interpre...
The goal of the Ontology Summit 2010 was to address the current shortage of persons with ontology expertise by developing a strategy for the education of ontologists. To achieve this goal we studied how ontologists are currently trained, the requirements identified by organizations that hire ontologists, and developments that might impact the train...
The notion of ontology today comes with two perspectives: one traditionally from philosophy and one more recently from computer
science. The philosophical perspective of ontology focuses on categorial analysis, i.e., what are the entities of the world
and what are the categories of entities? Prima facie, the intention of categorial analysis is to i...
We distinguish between ontological architecture and ontology architecture, though they are closely related. Ontology architecture is emerging as a distinct discipline in ontology engineering – as an ontology development and deployment structure and methodology
(Fernandéz et al., 1997). It necessarily also includes aspects of what is sometimes terme...
This chapter looks at the intersection of intelligence and ontologies and semantic technologies, and tries to characterize the impact of these in the future. It provides a view into some emerging technologies such as query languages and rule standards for the Semantic Web. It also provides some guidance from a different domain, the biomedical domai...
Ontologies enable explicit expression of collective concepts and support Machine-to-Machine (M2M) interactions at the semantic level. Ontologies expressed in a standard language, such as the Web Ontology Language (OWL) and exposed on a network offer the potential for unprecedented interoperability solutions since they are semantically rich, compute...
In recent years ontologies and semantic technologies more generally have begun to be applied to assist the intelligence community, for information integration, information-sharing, decision-support, and in many other applications. This chapter introduces the topic of the book and provides background information concerning its rationale, historical...
Although we would prefer using defined ontologies that express the domains and specifications of web services, and thus more easily discover and compose these, we know that in the mainstream world represented by the US Department of Defense we will not have those ontologies available soon. In the meantime we have to ensure a transition from structu...
We present a method using semantic Web technologies to dynamically compose a chain of Web services that answers a stated information problem. Web services description language (WSDL) files that define the services are automatically examined and input and output messages are extracted. The XML schema definitions are converted to OWL ontology files....
The US Department of Defense (DoD) Chief Information Office (CIO) has embarked on an enterprise data management transformation initiative known as the DoD Net-Centric Data Strategy (NCDS). NCDS-related directives require DoD components, such as the United States Air Force (USAF), to describe mission-critical information assets using shared metadata...
This statement of interest presents a brief rationale and description of issues for using ontology alignment as a key step in dynamically chaining together a sequence of web services.
We are researching the interaction between the rule and the ontology layers of the Semantic Web, by comparing two options: 1) using OWL and its rule extension SWRL to develop an integrated ontology/rule language, and 2) layering rules on top of an ontology with RuleML and OWL. Toward this end, we are developing the SWORIER system, which enables eff...
We address what is still a scarcity of general mathematical foundations for ontology-based semantic integration underlying current knowledge engineering methodologies in decentralised and distributed environments. After recalling the first-order ontology-based ...
To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP), 2008. We are researching the interaction between the rule and the ontology layers of the Semantic Web, by comparing two options: 1) using OWL and its rule extension SWRL to develop an integrated ontology/rule language, and 2) layering rules on top of an ontology with RuleML and OWL. Towa...
Ontologies enable explicit expression of collective concepts and support Machine-to-Machine (M2M) interactions at the semantic level. Ontologies expressed in a standard language, such as the Web Ontology Language (OWL) and exposed on a network offer the potential for unprecedented interoperability solutions since they are semantically rich, compute...
Ontologies enable explicit expression of collective concepts and support Machine-to-Machine (M2M) interactions at the semantic level. Ontologies expressed in a standard language, such as the Web Ontology Language (OWL) and exposed on a network offer the potential for unprecedented interoperability solutions since they are semantically rich, compute...
Recent years have seen rapid progress in the development of ontologies as semantic models intended to capture and represent
aspects of the real world. There is, however, great variation in the quality of ontologies. If ontologies are to become progressively
better in the future, more rigorously developed, and more appropriately compared, then a sys...
For the US Department of Defense (DoD)'s efforts to achieve net-centricity, more intelligent ways of handling information must be pursued, in particular using machine- interpretable semantic models, i.e., ontologies. One approach, which we've adopted in current and emerging research projects, is to combine Semantic Web technologies with logic progr...
The behavior of Department of Defense (DoD) Command and Control (C2) services is typically embedded in executable code, providing
static functionality that is difficult to change. As the complexity and tempo of world events increase, C2 systems must move
to a new paradigm that supports the ability to dynamically modify service behavior in complex,...
As the complexity and tempo of world events increase, command and control (C2) systems must move to a new paradigm that supports the ability to dynamically modify system behavior in complex, changing environments. Historically, the behavior of Department of Defense (DoD) C2 systems has been embedded in executable code, providing static functionalit...
On March 14-15 in Gaithersburg, MD, at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the Upper Ontology Summit (UOS) took place. The Upper Ontology Summit was a convening of custodians of several prominent upper ontologies, key ontology technology participants, and interested other parties, with the purpose of finding a means to rel...
Historically, the behavior of Department of Defense (DoD) Command and Control (C2) systems has been embedded in executable code, providing static functionality that is difficult to change. As the complexity and tempo of the world increase, C2 systems must move to a new paradigm that supports the ability to dynamically modify system behavior in comp...
This paper discusses aspects of context as applied to ontologies. In particular, we note some formalizat ions of context that have been applied to ontologies such a s Menzel (1999) and Akman & Surov (1996, 1997), that have largely been framed in terms of theories such as Situation Theory (Barwise & Perry, 1983) which originated in natural language...
Historically, the behavior of U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) Command and Control (C2) systems has been embedded in executable code and procedure, providing static functionality that is slow to change. As the complexity and tempo of the world increase, C2 systems must move to a paradigm that supports dynamic modification of system behavior in comp...
In this paper, we discuss the use of ontologies for semantic interoperability and integration. We argue that information technology has evolved into a world of largely loosely coupled systems and as such, needs increasingly more explicit, machine-interpretable semantics. Ontologies in the form of logical domain theories and their knowledge bases of...
In this article, we discuss some issues that arise when ontologies are used to support corporate application domains such as electronic commerce (e-commerce) and some technical problems in deploying ontologies for real-world use. In particular, we focus on issues of ontology integration and the related problem of semantic mapping, that is, the mapp...
This paper describes a useful set of NLP tools which has been successfully applied to many different kinds of industrial requirements spanning muitiple domains and applications at Boeing. The tools can be combined to constitute a full-spectrum natural language system and can be customized for new domains relatively easily. To date, this array of fo...
In this paper we discuss the use of ontologies to support semantically interop- erable B2B electronic cotnmerce. First, we describe the nature of B2B and the kinds of applications used. Second, we present arguments towards why B2B needs ontologies and the nature of the problems faced. Finally, we discuss the interaction of ontologists and domain ex...
In this paper we discuss the nature of our overall enterprise tocreate ontologies in the product and service knowledge space forBusiness-to-Business (B2B) electronic commerce. We describe onecrucial problem: the mapping problem, i.e., mapping amongontologies, taxonomies, and classification systems, some of whichare more semantically sound and coher...
Semantic interoperability is a growing challenge in the United States Department of Defense (DoD). In this paper, we describe the basis of an infrastructure for the reconciliation of relevant, but semantically heterogeneous attribute values. Three types of information are described which can be used to infer the context of attributes, making explic...
Enterprise wide interoperability means distributed computing on heterogeneous hardware using heterogeneous implementation languages. Successful information exchange between interoperating systems today depends on data standardization. There are several problems, however, with this approach. This paper looks at some ingredients for a more complete n...
Technology is within reach today to significantly improve the design/build environment for large scale engineering efforts such as those undertaken by the aerospace industry and defense contractors. On large and possibly geographically distributed teams, strong task management and easy information distribution is required to minimize the time neces...
We propose an agent-based architecture for providing partially automated support to large, concurrent engineering environments that have adopted Integrated Product Team (IPT) practices. We describe classes of agents, show various views from the individual users to the network with a hierarchy for control and coordination, and sketch our strategies...
As part of the DARPA Rapid Design Exploration and Optimization (RaDEO) program, Boeing, Philadelphia, is involved in an on-going concurrent design engineering research project called MADEsmart which seeks to partially automate the Integrated Product Team (IPT) concept used by Boeing for organizing the design engineering process, with the aid of int...
In this position paper, we briefly describe the perspective of the US National Center for Ontological Research (NCOR, http://ncor.us) on ontology evaluation. NCOR's inauguration was recently held (October 2005), and at that time goals were identified and committees formed to pursue those goals, including the Ontology Evaluation Committee. This comm...
Recent years have seen rapid progress in the development of ontologies as semantic models intended to capture and represent aspects of the real world. There is, however, great variation in the quality of ontologies. If ontologies are to become progressively better in the future, more rigorously developed, and more appropriately compared, then a sys...
Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 1993. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 467-503).