Case-based reasoning within semantic Web technologies

Abstract

The semantic Web relies on the publication of formally represented knowledge (ontologies), retrieved and manipulated by software agents using reasoning mechanisms. OWL (Web Ontology Language), the knowledge representation language of the semantic Web, has been designed on the basis of description logics, for the use of deductive mechanisms such as classification and instantiation. Case-Based reasoning is a reasoning paradigm that relies on the reuse of cases stored in a case base. This reuse is usually performed by the adaptation of the solution of previously solved problems, retrieved from the case base, thanks to analogical reasoning. This article is about the integration of case-based reasoning into the semantic Web technologies, addressing the issue of analogical reasoning on the semantic Web. In particular, we show how OWL is extended for the representation of adaptation knowledge, and how the retrieval and adaptation steps of case-based reasoning are implemented on the basis of OWL reasoning. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.