Re: Ontology "views"/"perspetcives"

One group doing this type of work is the Context Interchange project at 
the MIT Sloan School, http://context.mit.edu/~coin/  They have not been 
doing general ontology work, but rather using ontology concepts to 
integrate heterogeneous databases and wrapped Web sources).  However, 
they do use an ontology to define common semantic concepts, as well as 
the "contexts" within which the different data sources and users 
requesting information are operating.  They can deal with translations 
between different terms used by the various parties, as well as 
variations in meaning for a single term that the various parties might 
have in mind.  For example, a user might ask for the "price" of some 
item on the Web, and the system would have to deal with what the user's 
assumptions might be in terms of currency, whether tax and shipping were 
included, and so on, and translate the request appropriately based on 
the fact that the different sources might have their own ideas of what a 
"price" was (e.g., no sales tax in New Hampshire vs. 5% sales tax in 
Massachusetts, whether to apply the tax based on where the requestor was 
located, and so on).  They currently use a language based on F-logic, 
and are trying to move toward using RDF/DAML concepts for better 
integration with Web evolution.

--Frank

Jim Starz wrote:

> Does anyone know of any work that has been done for ontology "views" or 
> "perspectives" on the user level?  I am not referring to versioning, 
> though the solution could probably leverage that work.
> 
>  
> 
> Here is the problem.  You have a (logical) ontology and many users that 
> would like to customize the ontology for their use (have their own 
> labels, ignore some properties, prefer certain properties).  The 
> ultimate goal would be to allow the user to have a subset of the 
> original ontology with some preferences (If I query for something that 
> has a "name" property, I prefer to see the "common name", if none exists 
> the "formal name").  All you really need is a mapping between the 
> original ontology and these "views" and I was wondering if anyone had 
> thought up a "common" language for that.  I don't think the solution is 
> contained in RDFS/DAML, but maybe the webont group is addressing this.
> 
>  
> 
> thanks,
> 
> Jim Starz
> 
> ISX Corporation
> 
>  
> 


-- 
Frank Manola                   The MITRE Corporation
202 Burlington Road, MS A345   Bedford, MA 01730-1420
mailto:fmanola@mitre.org       voice: 781-271-8147   FAX: 781-271-875

Received on Friday, 14 December 2001 17:08:09 UTC