An Extensible Approach for Modeling Ontologies in RDF(S)

Hi,

following recent discussions we thought the follow tech report might be
of interest to this list (even though some tutorial section aims at a
somewhat
different community):

An Extensible Approach for Modeling Ontologies in RDF(S)

available for download from:
http://www.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/~sst/Research/Publications/onto-rdfs.pdf

Technical Report 401, Institute AIFB, Karlsruhe University.
http://www.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/WBS

Abstract. RDF(S) constitutes a newly emerging standard for metadata that

is about to turn the World Wide Web into a machine-understandable
knowledge base. It is an XML application that allows for the denotation
of facts and schemata in a web-compatible format, building on an
elaborate object-model for describing concepts and relations. Thus, it
might turn up as a natural choice for a widely-useable ontology
description language. However, its lack of capabilities for describing
the semantics of concepts and relations beyond those provided by
inheritance mechanisms makes it a rather weak language for even the
most austere knowledge-based system. This paper presents an
approach for modeling ontologies in RDF(S) that also considers
axioms as objects that are describable in RDF(S). Thus, we
provide flexible, extensible, and adequate means for accessing
and exchanging axioms in RDF(S). Our approach follows the
spirit of the World Wide Web, as we do not assume a global
axiom specification language that is too intractable for one
purpose and too weak for the next, but rather a methodology
that allows (communities of) users to specify what axioms are
interesting in their domain.

Best regards,

Steffen