Knowledge Representation -

Ontological Engineering

IT8601 Ontological Engineering S. Prabhavathi AP/IT 1

 Knowledge Representation

• Knowledge-representation is the field of AI dedicated to

representing information about the world in a form that a
computer system can utilize to solve complex tasks.

• This topic addresses what content to put into knowledge base

• How to represent facts about the world?

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 Ontological engineering

• Ontology engineering is a set of tasks related to the

development of ontologies for a particular domain.

• Google definition: a set of concepts and categories in a

subject area or domain that shows their properties and
the relations between them.

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 Ontological engineering

• How to create more general and flexible representations

– Concepts like actions, time, physical objects and beliefs
– Operates on a bigger scale than knowledge engineering
• Representing these abstract concepts is sometimes called
ontological engineering.
• Define general framework of concepts (because representing
everything is challenging) called as upper ontology with general
concepts at the top and more specific concepts below the hierarchy
• Limitations of logic representation
– Red, green and yellow tomatoes: exceptions and uncertainty

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 Ontological engineering
• Defining terms in the domain and relations among them
– Defining concepts in the domain(classes)
– Arranging the concepts in a hierarchy(subclass-superclass
hierarchy)
– Defining which attributes and properties classes can have
and constraints on their values
– Defining individuals and filling in property values

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 The upper ontology of the world. Each link indicates that the lower concept
is a specialization of the upper one.

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 General-purpose ontology

• A general-purpose ontology should be applicable in more or

less any special-purpose domain.
– Add domain-specific axioms
• In any sufficiently demanding domain, different areas of
knowledge need to be unified.
– Reasoning and problem solving could involve several areas
simultaneously
• What do we need to express?
– Categories, Measures, Composite objects, Time, Space,
Change, Events, Processes, Physical Objects, Substances,
Mental Objects, Beliefs

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 Categories and objects

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 Categories and objects

• KR requires the organization of objects into categories.

Although
– Interaction at the level of the object
– Reasoning at the level of categories
• Categories play a role in predictions about objects
– Based on perceived properties
• Categories can be represented in two ways by FOL
1. Predicates: apple(x)
2. Reification of categories into objects: apples
• Category = set of its members
– Example: Member(x, apples), x ∈ apples,
– Subset(apples, fruits), apples ⊂ fruits

Reify: make (something abstract) more concrete or real.

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 Category Organization
• Categories serve to organize and simplify the knowledge
base through inheritance.
• Relation = inheritance:
– All instance of food are edible, fruit is a subclass of food and apples
is a subclass of fruit then an apple is edible.
– Individual apples inherit the property of edibility from food

• Defines a taxonomy
– Subclass relations
organize categories

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 FOL and Categories
• First-order logic makes it easy to state facts about categories,
either by relating objects to categories or by quantifying over their
members.
Example:
• An object is a member of a category
– MemberOf(BB12,Basketballs)
• A category is a subclass of another category
– SubsetOf(Basketballs, Balls)
• All members of a category have some properties
– ∀ x (MemberOf(x, Basketballs) ⇒ Round(x))
• All members of a category can be recognized by some properties
– ∀ x (Orange(x) ∧ Round(x) ∧ Diameter(x)=9.5in ∧
MemberOf(x,Balls) ⇒ MemberOf(x, BasketBalls))
• A category as a whole has some properties
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– MemberOf(Dogs, DomesticatedSpecies)
 Relations between Categories

• Two or more categories are disjoint if they are mutually

exclusive
– Disjoint({Animals, Vegetables})
• A decomposition of a class into categories is called
exhaustive if each object of the class must belong to at
least one category
– living = {animal, vegetable, fungi, bacteria}
• A partition is an exhaustive decomposition of a class into
disjoint subsets.
– student = {undergraduate, graduate}

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 Natural kinds

• Many categories have no clear-cut definitions (e.g., chair,

bush, book).
• Tomatoes: sometimes green, orange, red, yellow. Mostly
spherical, smaller, larger etc
• One solution: Separate what is true of all instances of a
category from what is true only of typical instances.
• subclass using category Typical(Tomatoes)
– Typical(c) ⊆ c
• ∀ x, x ∈ Typical(Tomatoes) ⇒ Red(x) ∧ Spherical(x)
• This helps us to write down useful facts about categories
without providing exact definitions.

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 Physical composition

• One object may be part of another:

– PartOf(Bucharest,Romania)
– PartOf(Romania,EasternEurope)
– PartOf(EasternEurope,Europe)
• The PartOf predicate is transitive (and reflexive), so we
can infer that PartOf(Bucharest,Europe)
• More generally:
– ∀ x PartOf(x,x)
– ∀ x,y,z PartOf(x,y) ∧ PartOf(y,z) ⇒ PartOf(x,z)

Logical Minimization: Defining an object as the smallest one

satisfying certain conditions.

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 Measurements

• Objects have height, mass, cost,....

– Values that we assign to these properties are called measures
• Combine Unit functions with a number to measure line
segment object L1
– Length(L1) = Inches(1.5) = Centimeters(3.81).
• Conversion between units:
– ∀ i Centimeters(2.54 x i)=Inches(i).
• Some measures have no scale:
– Beauty, Difficulty, etc.
– Most important aspect of measures is not numerical values, but
measures can be orderable.
– An apple can have deliciousness .9 or .1

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 Objects: Things and stuff

• Stuff: Defy any obvious individuation after division into

distinct objects (mass nouns)
• Things: Individuation(count nouns)

• Example: Butter(stuff) and Cow(things)

b ∈ Butter ∧ PartOf(p, b) ⇒ p ∈ Butter

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 References

• Textbook
• https://www.cs.iusb.edu/~danav/teach/
c463/10_knowledge.html

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