Schema matching is a fundamental issue in many database applications, such as query mediation and data warehousing. It becomes a challenge when different vocabularies are used to refer to the same real-world concepts. In this context, a convenient approach, sometimes called extensional, instancebased or semantic, is to detect how the same real world objects are represented in different database...

State of the art reasoners for expressive description logics, such as those that underpin the OWL ontology language, are typically based on highly optimized implementations of (hyper)tableau algorithms. Despite numerous optimizations, certain ontologies encountered in practice still pose significant challenges to such reasoners, mainly because of the size of the model abstractions that they con...

OWL-S [1] is one of the emerging standards for the semantic description of web services in order to enable their automatic discovery, execution and composition by software agents. An important task within automatic execution of an OWL-S service is the bi-directional mapping between semantically higher level OWL-S service parameter descriptions and primitive XML Schema types of its grounding. OW...

This paper describes a proposed new syntax that can be used to write and read OWL ontologies in Controlled Natural Language (CNL): a well-defined subset of the English language. Following the lead of Manchester OWL Syntax in making OWL more accessible for non-logicians, and building on the previous success of Schwitter’s PENG (Processable English), the proposed Sydney OWL Syntax enables two-way...

The Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA) represents the result of manual and disciplined modeling of the structural organization of the human body. It is a tremendous resource in bioinformatics that facilitates sharing of information among applications that use anatomy knowledge. The FMA was developed in Protégé and the Protégé frames language is the canonical representation language for the FMA...

The desire to share and reuse knowledge has led to the establishment of the Web Ontology Language (OWL) knowledge representation language. The Naturnet-Redime project needs to share qualitative knowledge models of issues relevant to sustainable development and OWL seems the obvious choice for representing such models to allow search and other activities relevant to sharing knowledge models. How...

This paper proposes an addition to OWL 2 syntax to incorporate nominal schemas, which is a new description-logic style extension of OWL 2 which was recently proposed, and which makes is possible to express “variable nominal classes” within axioms in an OWL 2 ontology. Nominal schemas make it possible to express DL-safe rules of arbitrary arity within the extended OWL paradigm, hence covering th...

This paper describes the design and implementation of an OWL 1.1 API, herein referred to as the OWL API . The API is designed to facilitate the manipulation of OWL 1.1 ontologies at a high level of abstraction for use by editors, reasoners and other tools. The API is based on the OWL 1.1 specification and influenced by the experience of designing and using the WonderWeb API and OWL-based applic...

The W3C standard OWL provides a decidable language for representing ontologies. While its use is rapidly spreading, efforts are being made by researchers worldwide to augment OWL with additional expressive features or by interlacing it with other forms of knowledge representation, in order to make it applicable for even further purposes. In this paper, we integrate OWL with one of the most succ...