Re: Domain and range are useful Re: DBpedia 3.2 release, including DBpedia Ontology and RDF links to Freebase

This is an interesting discussion.  By coincidence, yesterday Tom
Briggs [1] defended his dissertation [2] on 'Constraint Generation and
Reasoning in OWL' which was done with Professor Yun Peng [3].  He
started with an analysis of Swoogle's data that showed that 75% of
published Semantic Web properties have neither domain or range
constraints and evaluated algorithms for inferring them.  Rather than
focusing on instance data, he looked at what could be learned from how
the properties were used in the TBOX, e.g., for specifying role
restrictions.  He has a paper on this that he has submitted to a
conference and should finish revising his dissertation in the next few
weeks.  Here is the abstract for his defense:

  Constraint Generation and Reasoning in OWL
  Thomas H. Briggs

  The majority of OWL ontologies in the emerging Semantic Web are
  constructed from properties that lack domain and range
  constraints. Constraints in OWL are different from the familiar uses
  in programming languages and databases, and are actually type
  assertions that are made about the individuals which are connected
  by the property. These assertions can add vital information to the
  model because they are assertions of type on the individuals
  involved, and they can also give information on how the defining
  property may be used.

  Three different automated generation techniques are explored in this
  research: disjunction, least-common named subsumer, and
  vivification. Each algorithm is compared for the ability to
  generalize, and the performance impacts with respect to the
  reasoner. A large sample of ontologies from the Swoogle repository
  are used to compare real-world performance of these techniques.

  Finally, using generated facts, a type of default reasoning, may
  conflict with future assertions to the knowledge base. While general
  default reasoning is non-monotonic and undecidable a novel approach
  is introduced to support efficient retraction of the default
  knowledge. Combined, these techniques enable a robust and efficient
  generation of domain and range constraints which will result in
  inference of additional facts and improved performance for a number
  of Semantic Web applications.

[1] http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/person/html/Tom/Briggs/
[2] http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/event/html/id/273/
[3] http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/person/html/Yun/Peng/


-- 
 Tim Finin, Computer Science & Electrical Engineering, Univ of Maryland
 Baltimore County, 1000 Hilltop Cir, Baltimore MD 21250. finin@umbc.edu
 http://umbc.edu/~finin 410-455-3522 fax:-3969 http://ebiquity.umbc.edu 

Received on Tuesday, 18 November 2008 13:13:45 UTC