Ontolog invited Speaker Presentation - Professor John Bateman - Thu 2008.01.31    (17I8)

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Attendees    (17J4)

Agenda & Proceedings    (17JC)

http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/resource/presentation/JohnBateman_20080131/JohnB_1d.gif [Professor Dr. John Bateman]    (17JE)

. Title: Ontology Structuring Mechanisms and Ontological Modularity: ongoing research and targeted applications    (17JF)

In this talk we present results from our ongoing research into ontological structuring and modularity. Formally structured ontologies are explicitly designed to rely on modular specifications. This is understood to mean both that the modular structure of an ontology is explicitly represented and that that structure is itself used in the processing, development, maintenance and reuse of the ontology. The basis for our work is the adoption of the de facto standard for representing and reasoning with algebraic specifications: CASL (the Common Algebraic Specification Language: http://www.cofi.info). CASL provides a range of logics (including full first order, modal logic, description logic and others) for constructing heterogeneous specifications combined with interfaces to reasoning tools and, most importantly here, explicit structuring devices. Our use of CASL accordingly shows some similarities with the adoption of Common Logic for ontology specification, but with an additional focus particularly on structuring mechanisms for ontologies as a whole. Defining formal modular ontologies appears to have both theoretical and practical benefits. Targetting formally represented modularity forces a cleaner conception of the constructs proposed and their interrelationships, while also providing opportunities for decomposing complex problems into more manageable subproblems. One particular direction of our investigation involves the definition of relationships between ontologies using theory morphisms, and the incorporation and generalization of previous approaches to relating ontologies within a single computationally supported formal framework. We set out how CASL and its associated tools help us with this. Finally, we give several examples from our research and the domains we are investigating: including representations of space and of natural languages for dialogic interaction.    (17JH)

John Bateman, Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Bremen, researches in functional and computational linguistics, focusing particularly on multilingual and multimodal linguistic description, and computational instantiations of linguistic theory. He obtained his Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence from Edinburgh University in 1986 and worked subsequently in computational linguistics projects at Kyoto University, the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California, the German National Research Center for Information Technology in Darmstadt, and the Stirling University, Scotland. His current interests revolve around the relationship of linguistically-motivated ontologies to other ontological realms and the construction of computational dialogue systems for robot-human communication using such ontologies. He has published widely in all these areas, as well as authoring several introductory and survey articles on natural language generation and systemic-functional linguistics. He has been working on linguistically motivated ontologies since 1989 and is is currently the coordinator of the Bremen Ontology Research Group (http://www.fb10.uni-bremen.de/ontology).    (17JP)

K. Lüttich, T. Mossakowski, B. Krieg-Brückner (2005). Ontologies for the Semantic Web in CASL. In J. L. Fiadeiro, P. Mosses, F. Orejas (Eds.), Recent Trends in Algebraic Development Techniques, 17th International Workshop (WADT 2004), Vol. 3423, pp. 106–125, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. (http://www.informatik.uni-bremen.de/~luettich/papers/owl-casl-dl.pdf)    (19ME)

K. Lüttich, T. Mossakowski (2004). Specification of Ontologies in CASL. In Achille C. Varzi, Laure Vieu (Eds.), Formal Ontology in Information Systems -- Proceedings of the Third International Conference (FOIS-2004), Vol. 114, pp. 140–150, Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications. IOS Press, Amsterdam. (http://www.informatik.uni-bremen.de/~luettich/papers/onto-casl-fois.pdf)    (19MF)

John Bateman, Stefano Borgo, Klaus Lüttich, Claudio Masolo, Till Mossakowski (2007). Ontological Modularity and Spatial Diversity. In Spatial Cognition and Computation, 7 (1), pp. 97–128.    (18GK)

John Bateman, Thora Tenbrink, Scott Farrar (2007). The Role of Conceptual and Linguistic Ontologies in Discourse. Dialogue Modelling: Computational and Empirical Approaches. In Special Issue of Discourse Processes, 44 (3), pp. 175–213.    (18GL)

M. Codescu, O. Kutz and T. Mossakowski (2007). Shapes of Alignments. Construction, Composition, and Computation. Manuscript, http://www.informatik.uni-bremen.de/~okutz/shapes.pdf    (18GM)

O. Kutz and T. Mossakowski (2007). Modules in Transition: Conservativity, Composition, and Colimits. 2nd International Workshop on Modular Ontologies (WoMO-07). http://ftp.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/Publications/CEUR-WS/Vol-315/    (18GN)

B. Cuenca-Grau and O. Kutz (2007). Modular Ontology Languages Revisited. In Proc. of the IJCAI-07 Workshop on Semantic Web for Collaborative Knowledge Acquisition (SWeCKa).    (18H7)

Michel Bidoit, Peter D. Mosses (2004) CASL User Manual - Introduction to Using the Common Algebraic Specification Language. LNCS Vol. 2900, Springer. http://www.cofi.info    (18GQ)

Peter D. Mosses (2004) CASL Reference Manual - The Complete Documentation of the Common Algebraic Specification Language. LNCS Vol. 2960, Springer. http://www.cofi.info    (18HA)

Till Mossakowski, Christian Maeder, Klaus Lüttich (2007). The Heterogeneous Tool Set. In Orna Grumberg, Michael Huth (Eds.), TACAS 2007, LNCS Vol. 4424, pp. 519–522, Springer. http://www.dfki.de/sks/hets http://www.informatik.uni-bremen.de/~till/papers/hets-tacas-toolpaper.pdf    (18GT)

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Audio Recording of this Session    (17K5)