Synopsis
The word "ontology" was once the darling of graduate students in philosophy, who understood it to be a systematic explanation of being. Now computer scientists, knowledge engineers and designers of artificial intelligence devices understand it to be a well-defined specification of a shared conceptualization, or abstract model, and apply it to "ontology languages." Corcho (ontological engineering, U. Politécnica de Madrid) presents a new model for building and maintaining ontology translation systems that uses layered architecture (lexical, syntax, semantic and pragmatic), and proposes representing ontology translation decisions declaratively in the language ODEDialect (made up of ODELex, ODESyntax, and ODESem) while focusing on semantic and pragmatic preservation. He includes descriptions of the experiments he performed to evaluate the ontology language model he proposes. Annotation ©2005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
From the Back Cover
The ontology translation problem (a.k.a. ontology interoperability problem) appears when we decide to reuse an ontology (or part of an ontology) with a tool or language that is different from the ones in which the ontology is available. If we force each ontology-based system developer, individually, to commit to the task of translating and incorporating to their systems the ontologies that they need, they will require a lot of effort and time to achieve their objective. This book presents two contributions to the current state-of-the-art on ontology translation among languages and / or tools. The first contribution is a proposal for a new model for building and maintaining ontology translation systems, characterised by two main features. At first, it identifies four layers where ontology translation decisions can be taken: lexical, syntax, semantic and semiotic. This layered architecture is based on existing work in formal languages and the theory of signs. Secondly, it proposes to represent ontology translation decisions declaratively. The second contribution characterises existing ontology translation approaches from the perspectives of semantic and pragmatic preservation, that is, consequence and intended meaning preservation respectively. It also describes the lifecycle of ontologies in cyclic ontology translation processes, which are defined as successive translations where the initial source and final target formats coincide.
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