NOTE: this project was completed in 2007 and formed the basis for the SAIL project.
The NICTA Ontology Toolkit project was conceived as a Neville Roach Laboratory project to provide a home for the ontology research being conducted within the Managing Complexity Theme, and to function as a springboard for more focused ontology research in the future.
The ontology toolkit project had three components:
- The development of an ontology toolkit.
- The provision of expertise on Semantic Web technologies to government and industry.
- Involvement with Standards Australia on the development of standardised ontologies in various domains.
Objectives
The purpose of component 1 was to build a toolkit which assists in the creation, use and maintenance of ontologies. In situations where rapid response is needed, it is crucial that all involved have a shared vocabulary and that there is agreement on the meaning of the terms used. This can be done using ontologies as the representational formalism. Systems for constructing and maintaining ontologies have been around for at least 15 years.
The processes involved in constructing ontologies, and in integrating the ontologies used by different players pose difficult scientific questions. Even when there is agreement about the underlying terms used, there is still the problem of uncertain and possibly conflicting information obtained from disparate sources. Solutions to these problems presuppose a system which is able to reason about ontologies. Nowadays many systems can perform reasoning fairly efficiently, but this usually amounts to little more than reporting the existence of conflicting information in an ontology, and no support for resolving such conflicts.
The purpose of component 2 was to use ontologies to contribute to the quality of information used by business and govertnment.
The purpose of component 3 was to facilitate the interoperability of data by helping to develop standards.
Achievements
For Component 1, algorithms and software implementing them were developed for managing inconsistencies in ontologies. This work further developed into a separate project called ''Situation Awareness by Inference and Logic'' (SAIL). For details, please refer to the SAIL web page.
For Components 2 and 3, the main outcome was the NICTA Semantic Technology Forum which took place in Sydney in May 2006. Numerous representatives from industry and government attended the presentations delivered by NICTA, CSIRO and Standards Australia. Another outcome has been the involvement of Anne Cregan with the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), in particular with the working group for OWL1.1 and the XG on Reasoning with Uncertainty for the Semantic Web.
Research Team
Thomas Meyer (project leader), Maurice Pagnucco, Anne Cregan, Kevin Lee.
Publications
1. Thomas Meyer. Managing inconsistent ontologies (invited presentation), Dagstuhl seminar: Belief change in rational agents, 7-12 August 2005.
2. Thomas Meyer, Kevin Lee, Richard Booth, Knowledge integration for description logics, in Manuela Veloso and Subbarao Kambhampati, eds., Proceedings of AAAI05, Twentieth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2005, pages 645-650, 2005, AAAI Press.
3. Thomas Meyer, Kevin Lee, Jeff Pan, Richard Booth. Finding Maximally Satisfiable Terminologies for the Description Logic ALC, in Proceedings of AAAI06, Twenty First National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2006, pages 269-274, AAAI Press.
4. Thomas Meyer, Kevin Lee, Jeff Pan. Computing Maximally Satisfiable Terminologies for the Description Logic ALC with Cyclic Definitions, in Proceedings of DL2006, International Workshop on Description Logics, 2006.
5. Rolf Schwitter, Anne Cregan, Thomas Meyer. Sydney OWL Syntax - towards a Controlled Natural Language Syntax for OWL 1.1, in Proceedings of OWL-ED 2007, OWL Experiences and Directions, Third International Workshop, to appear.