Most of current ontology languages and methodologies lack of learning support combined with reasoning mechanisms. This motivates us creating an ontology learning and reasoning framework in order to guarantee accuracy, transparency and consistency of ontology representation by automatic or semiautomatic methods of ontology learning and reasoning. Novelty of our approach is in combining ontology ...

The application of upper ontologies has been repeatedly advocated for supporting interoperability between domain ontologies in order to facilitate shared data use both within and across disciplines. We have developed BioTop as a top-domain ontology to integrate more specialized ontologies in the biomolecular and biomedical domain. In this paper, we report on concrete integration problems of thi...

This thesis investigates one of the fundamental problems for Ubiquitous Computing: managing metadata to enable resource discovery. This work presents a flexible and general model of metadata, and proposes to use ontologies as a formal language for the metadata of a Ubiquitous Computing Environment. Ontologies provide a common language for metadata among diverse and autonomous entities and space...

Semantic descriptions of non-textual media available on the web can be used to facilitate retrieval and presentation of media assets and documents containing them. While technologies for multimedia semantic descriptions already exist, there is as yet no formal description of a high quality multimedia ontology that is compatible with existing (semantic) web technologies. We explain the complexit...

Ontology design patterns are normally instantiated by replicating and adapting the pattern concepts and roles. The relation between pattern definitions and their instantiations is documented in natural language. The use of parametric ontologies or pattern-reuse modifications to OWL-DL has been suggested before, but so far only practical aspects have been analysed, leaving the formal semantics o...

Mephisto is a framework that will enable ontologybased high-level information fusion. Within the framework, the name Mephisto can be used to refer to a conceptualisation, an ontology, an agent, a society, a formal theory, and an implementation. A Mephisto conceptualisation assumes that the world can be understood in terms of processes. A Mephisto ontology is a specification of the conceptualisa...

Akoma Ntoso is an OASIS Committee Specification Draft standard for the electronic representations of parliamentary, normative and judicial documents in XML. Recently, it has been officially adopted by the United Nations (UN) as the main electronic format for making UN documents machine-processable. However, Akoma Ntoso does not force nor define any formal ontology for allowing the description o...

Over the past decade, the most significant evolution in organization might be the dawn of the new economy in connection with the value of intellectual assets. In this paper, we combine Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) with Protégé in order to construct ontology-based Yoga method serving both as an example, and a knowledge-sharing platform. This may build a picture of experts’ knowledge and underst...

In the graphical representation of ontologies, in particular for part_whole relationships, it is customary to use graph theory as the representational background. We claim here that the standard graph-based approach has a number of limitations, and because of that we propose a better way to represent part_whole structures for ontologies developed in accordance with the Basic Formal Ontology, on...

This report is a living document of the Research Group Ontologies in Medicine (Onto-Med) which represents work in progress towards a proposal for an integrated system of foundational ontologies. It will be applied to several fields of medicine, biomedicine, and biology, and a number of applications are carried out in collaboration with the Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and ...