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Formal Ontology Engineering in the DOGMA Approach

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On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems 2002: CoopIS, DOA, and ODBASE (OTM 2002)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 2519))

Abstract

This paper presents a specifically database-inspired approach (called DOGMA) for engineering formal ontologies, implemented as shared resources used to express agreed formal semantics for a real world domain. We address several related key issues, such as knowledge reusability and shareability, scalability of the ontology engineering process and methodology, efficient and effective ontology storage and management, and coexistence of heterogeneous rule systems that surround an ontology mediating between it and application agents. Ontologies should represent a domain’s semantics independently from “language”, while any process that creates elements of such an ontology must be entirely rooted in some (natural) language, and any use of it will necessarily be through a (in general an agent’s computer) language.

To achieve the claims stated, we explicitly decompose ontological resources into ontology bases in the form of simple binary facts called lexons and into so- called ontological commitments in the form of description rules and constraints. Ontology bases in a logic sense, become “representationless” mathematical objects which constitute the range of a classical interpretation mapping from a first order language, assumed to lexically represent the commitment or binding of an application or task to such an ontology base. Implementations of ontologies become database-like on-line resources in the model-theoretic sense. The resulting architecture allows to materialize the (crucial) notion of commitment as a separate layer of (software agent) services, mediating between the ontology base and those application instances that commit to the ontology. We claim it also leads to methodological approaches that naturally extend key aspects of database modeling theory and practice. We discuss examples of the prototype DOGMA implementation of the ontology base server and commitment server.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. VUB STARLab, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 2, B-1050, Brussels, Belgium

    Mustafa Jarrar & Robert Meersman

Authors
  1. Mustafa Jarrar
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  2. Robert Meersman
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. DOA Institute, p/a Leeuwlantstraat 83, 2100, Antwerp, Belgium

    Robert Meersman

  2. RMIT University School of Computer Science and IT, GPO Box 2476V, VIC 3001, Melbourne, Australia

    Zahir Tari

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© 2002 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Jarrar, M., Meersman, R. (2002). Formal Ontology Engineering in the DOGMA Approach. In: Meersman, R., Tari, Z. (eds) On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems 2002: CoopIS, DOA, and ODBASE. OTM 2002. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2519. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-36124-3_78

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-36124-3_78

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-00106-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-36124-4

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