Mike Uschold’s research while affiliated with The Boeing Company and other places

From 19.09.04 to 24.09.04, the Dagstuhl Seminar 04391 Semantic Interoperability and Integration was held in the International Conference and Research Center (IBFI), Schloss Dagstuhl. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The rst section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available.

The emergence of web standards for representing the semantics of information has enabled a new level of integration of information resources. In this paper we will discuss a number of issues related to semantic integration and the techniques we employed for integrating disparate resources. We will detail our approach, which includes the use of ontologies, information mapping and distributed queries. We will also show how we used RDF to represent different types of metadata within the system. Additionally, we will discuss some techniques for using certain types of semantic information to assist in the navigation of very large search spaces. In particular we will show how the tools we developed support an interactive querying paradigm for browsing information.

As the World Wide Web continues to expand, it becomes increasingly difficult for users to obtain information efficiently. Because most search engines read format languages such as HTML or SGML, search results reflect formatting tags more than actual page content, which is expressed in natural language. Spinning the Semantic Web describes an exciting new type of hierarchy and standardization that will replace the current "web of links" with a "web of meaning." Using a flexible set of languages and tools, the Semantic Web will make all available information—display elements, metadata, services, images, and especially content—accessible. The result will be an immense repository of information accessible for a wide range of new applications.This first handbook for the Semantic Web covers, among other topics, software agents that can negotiate and collect information, markup languages that can tag many more types of information in a document, and knowledge systems that enable machines to read Web pages and determine their reliability. The truly interdisciplinary Semantic Web combines aspects of artificial intelligence, markup languages, natural language processing, information retrieval, knowledge representation, intelligent agents, and databases.

In the coming years, the Web is expected to evolve from a structure containing information resources that have little or no explicit semantics to a structure having a rich semantic infrastructure. The key defining feature that is intended to distinguish the future Semantic Web from today's Web is that the contentoftheWebwillbeusablebymachines(i.e. software agents). Meaning needs to be communicated between agents who advertise and/or require the ability to perform tasks on the Web. Agents also need to determine the meaning of passive (i.e. non-agent) information resources on the web to perform these tasks.

In this paper, we will discuss the use of RDF-based metadata to achieve the semantic integration of corporate information resources. This approach uses the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Resource Description Framework Schema (RDFS) for the representation of all metadata characterizing the content of the information source as well as an interlinqua for standardizing all communications between system components. We will discuss the integration architecture and describe the metadata structures used. We will also describe how metadata facilitates information browsing and a practical approach to query optimization.

We report our experiences of converting a carefully defined informal ontology expressed in natural language into the formal language: Ontolingua. The objectives of this paper are 1) to explore some of the nitty gritty details of formalising ontology definitions and 2) to serve as a basis for clarifying the relationship between this and other approaches to ontology construction (e.g. using competency questions), for the eventual aim of producing a comprehensive methodology.

Our broad, overall goal is to enable cost-effective sharing of design knowledge between knowledge-based engineering software systems. To achieve this, we have identified and explored three different approaches for knowledge sharing, which we present in this paper: (i) Sharing services via point-to-point translation (ii) Neutral interchange formats (iii) Neutral authoring In all of these approaches, the issue of translation between the different underlying ontologies plays a major role. These three approaches differ significantly along several dimensions, including their cost (both immediate and longterm) , scale, usability, and maintainability. In this paper, we provide a description and critical assessment of each, based on one or more illustrations that used each approach. We analyze their successes and limitations, and offer some subjective advice about the circumstances under which each approach is appropriate. 1 Introduction There are many Knowledge-Based Engineering (...

In this paper, we describe an investigation into the reuse and application of an existing ontology for the purpose of specifying and formally developing software for aircraft design. Our goals were to clearly identify the processes involved in the task, and assess the cost-e#ectiveness of reuse. Our conclusions are that (re)using an ontology is far from an automated process, and instead requires significant e#ort from the knowledge engineer. We describe and illustrate some intrinsic properties of the ontology translation problem and argue that fully automatic translators are unlikely to be forthcoming in the foreseeable future. Despite the e#ort involved, our subjective conclusions are that in this case knowledge reuse was cost-e#ective, and that it would have taken significantly longer to design the knowledge content of this ontology from scratch in our application. Our preliminary results are promising for achieving larger-scale knowledge reuse in the future.

In this paper, we explore the issues related to creating, integrating and maintaining multiple local ontologies, and how and whether a global reference ontology can be of use. We note that a major problem in existing organizations is the lack of consistent terminology. The adoption of a global reference vocabulary or ontology seems an attractive solution in theory, but in practice, this approach seems untenable. We believe that a mixed approach which enables local groups to build maintain and use their own ontologies, in conjunction with a global reference ontology, and mapping between them is a more viable approach. We describe various issues and approaches that arise in attempting to do this.