Versatile visualization, authoring and reuse of ontological schemas leveraging on dataset summaries

Abstract

Ontologies and vocabularies written in the OWL language are a crucial part of the semantic web. OWL allows to model the same part of reality using different combinations of constructs, constituting ‘modeling styles’.We draft a novel approach to supporting ontology reuse and development with respect to this heterogeneity. The central notion of this approach is to use ontological background models to describe reality in a way that is OWL-independent and yet can be mapped to OWL. Using such models should enable easy comparison of ontologies from the same domain when they are designed using different modeling styles, automated generation of OWL style variants from existing ontologies or even generating completely new OWL ontologies in the desired style. The PhD thesis focuses on development and implementation of methods for design of ontological background models and their transformation to OWL. The methods include summarization of the actual ontology usage in an existing dataset, which can serve as a starting point for design of ontological background models and might also help to learn how to use the ontology for data annotation properly.