LECTURE 8

Knowledge Representation : AI 303

By
Dr.Ashraf Hendam
 OUTLINE
• Drawbacks of XML
• Basic Ideas of RDF
• RDF: Data Model
• Mapping XML into RDF Triples
• Semantic Web layers
• What is Ontology
• Why Semantic Web ontologies?
• Requirements for Ontology Language
 Drawbacks of XML
• XML is a universal metalanguage for defining
markup
• It provides a uniform framework for interchange
of data and metadata between applications
• However, XML does not provide any means of
talking about the semantics (meaning) of data
• E.g., there is no intended meaning associated
with the nesting of tags
• It is up to each application to interpret the
nesting
Basic Ideas of RDF
RDF: Data Model
RDF: Data Model
RDF: Data Model
RDF: Data Model
RDF: Data Model
RDF: Data Model
Mapping XML into RDF Triples (Example)
Semantic Web layers
 What is Ontology
“an explicit specification of a conceptualisation”
Gruber, 1993
“a formal, explicit specification of a shared
conceptualisation”
Studer et al, 1998
“an explicit representation of a shared understanding
of the important concepts in some domain of interest”
Kalfoglou, 2002
“a set of types, properties and relationships”
Wikipedia
 What is Ontology
• Essentially: a way of encoding domain knowledge
• But there are many different choices as to how this is
done.
• The word ontology is over-loaded: it means different
things to different people.
• Ontologies are also sometimes referred to as
vocabularies.
• A vocabulary is typically a lightweight ontology.
What is Ontology
What is Ontology
What is Ontology
Why Semantic Web ontologies?
• Data integration
• Inference
Why Semantic Web ontologies?
Why Semantic Web ontologies?
• RDF and RDF Schema are deliberately very
limited
• RDF is (roughly) limited to binary ground
predicates,
• RDF Schema is (roughly) limited to a subclass
hierarchy and a property hierarchy, with domain
and range definitions of these properties.
• They are designed with flexibility in mind
 Why Semantic Web ontologies?

• We need to express more advanced, more ‘expressive’ knowledge

• For example,
- that every person has exactly one birth date, or
- that no person can be both male and female at the same time.
• The Web Ontology Working Group and the OWL Working Group
identified a number of characteristic use cases for the Semantic
Web that require much more language features than those that
RDF and RDFS have
 Why Semantic Web ontologies?

• The resulting language, OWL, for the Web

Ontology Language, is closely related to a
fragment of a family of logics that are specially
crafted for representing terminological
knowledge: Description Logics (DL).
Roles of ontologies on the web
Roles of ontologies on the web
 Requirements for Ontology Language
• An explicit formal specification of the concepts in
a domain is called an ontology
• Languages that allow us to express ontologies are
therefore called ontology languages
• The main requirements for these languages are:
- a well-defined syntax,
- a formal semantics,
- sufficient expressive power,
- convenience of expression
- efficient reasoning support
 Syntax
• A syntax is well-defined if you can use it to write down everything a
language allows you to express in an unambiguous manner
• A well-defined syntax is not necessarily very user friendly
• For instance, the RDF/XML syntax is notoriously hard for people
to read.
• However, this drawback is not very significant because most
ontology engineers will use specialized ontology development
tools, rather than a text editor, for building ontologies
• OWL is build on RDF and RDFS and uses an extension of their
syntax
 Formal Semantics
• A formal semantics describes the meaning of a language precisely.
• Precisely means that the semantics does not refer to subjective intuitions,
nor is it open to different interpretations by different people (or machines).
• The importance of a formal semantics is well established in the domain of
mathematical logic
• The combination of formal semantics with a well-defined syntax allows to
interpret sentences expressed using the syntax: we know what is meant by
the sentence
• Formal semantics also allows to reason about the knowledge expressed in
the sentences
 Expressivity
• We can think of a resource as an object, a
“thing” we want to talk about
E.g. authors, books, publishers, places, people,
hotels
• Every resource has a Universal Resource
Identifier(URI).
• URIs are like Global Primary Key.
• A URI can be a URL (Web address) or
some other kind of unique identifier with an
optional fragment identifier at the end
 Expressivity
• Classification: we would like to use the conditions on
class membership to infer relations between the classes
themselves
• Equivalence between classes: for example, the class
Tortoise shares all its members with the class
Land_Turtle; they are therefore equivalent
• Equality between instances: we would like to be able
to state when two instances are the same: the
morning_star and the evening_star are names for the
same planet venus; these instances are therefore the
same.
 Expressivity
• Disjointness and Difference: sometimes we know that
two classes do not share any instances (they are
disjoint) or that two instances are decidedly not the same
thing.
• For example, Winner and Loser are disjoint in a game,
and roger_federer and rafael_nadal are different
individuals.
• Boolean Combinations of Classes: sometimes classes
need to be combined in ways that go beyond subclass
relations.
• For instance, we may want to define the class Person to
be the disjoint union of the classes Female and Male
 Reasoning Support
• Formal semantics is a prerequisite for reasoning support
• Derivations such as the preceding ones can be made
mechanically instead of by hand
• Automatic reasoning is important because it allows us to check
the correctness of the ontology
- check the consistency of the ontology
- check for unintended relations between classes
- check for unintended classifications of instances
• Checks like these are extremely valuable for designing large
ontologies, for cases where multiple authors are involved, and
for integrating and sharing ontologies from various sources.
 Web Ontology Language(OWL)
• OWL became a W3C standard in February 2004. OWL 2, and OWL2 in 27
October 2009.
• OWL is part of the "Semantic Web Vision" – The next generation of the Web
(Web 3.0).
• To describe the meaning/semantics of the Web data (RDF is written in terms of
OWL)
• OWL is called an ontology language.
• That is, what we specify in OWL is called an ontology (Ontology is about the
exact description of things and their relationships.)
• For the web, ontology is about the exact description of web information and
relationships between them.
 OWL versus RDFS and RDF
• OWL and RDFS are much of the same thing, but OWL
allow constrains and rules.
• OWL can be seen as an extension of RDF/RDFS, OWL
comes with a larger vocabulary and stronger syntax
than RDF and RDFS.
• OWL has three sublanguages (OWL full, OWL DL, OWL
Lite).