Ontologies and the Semantic Web

Ian Horrocks
<[email protected]>
Information Management Group
School of Computer Science
University of Manchester
The Semantic Web
Today’s Web

• Distributed hypertext/hypermedia
• Information accessed via (keyword based) search and browse
• Browser tools render information for human consumption
 What is the Semantic Web?
• Web was “invented” by Tim Berners-Lee (amongst others), a physicist
working at CERN
• His vision of the Web was much more ambitious than the reality of the
existing (syntactic) Web:

“… a set of connected applications …

forming a consistent logical web of data …”

“… an extension of the current web in which

information is given well-defined meaning,
better enabling computers and people to work
in cooperation …”

• This vision of the Web has become known as the Semantic Web
 Hard Work using “Syntactic Web”
Find images of Peter Patel-Schneider, Frank van Harmelen and
Alan Rector…

Rev. Alan M. Gates, Associate Rector of the

Church of the Holy Spirit, Lake Forest, Illinois
Impossible (?) using “Syntactic Web”
• Complex queries involving background knowledge
– Find information about “animals that use sonar but are neither bats
nor dolphins” , e.g., Barn Owl
• Locating information in data repositories
– Travel enquiries
– Prices of goods and services
– Results of human genome experiments
• Finding and using “web services”
– Given a DNA sequence, identify its genes, determine the proteins
they can produce, and hence the biological processes they control
• Delegating complex tasks to web “agents”
– Book me a holiday next weekend somewhere warm, not too far away,
and where they speak either French or English
What is the Problem?
Consider a typical web page:
• Markup consists of:
– rendering information
(e.g., font size and
colour)
– Hyper-links to related
content
• Semantic content is
accessible to humans,
but not (easily) to
computers…
What is the (Proposed) Solution?
• Add semantic annotations to web resources

Dr. Alan
<Person>Alan
Rector, Professor
Rector</Person>,
of Computer Rev. Alan
<Person>Alan
M. Gates,M.Associate
Gates</Person>,
Rector of the
<Job>Professor
Science, University
of Computer
of Manchester
Science</Job>, <Job>Associate
Church of the Holy
Rector</Job>
Spirit, Lake of
Forest,
the Church
Illinoisof
University of Manchester the Holy Spirit, Lake Forest, Illinois
What is the (Proposed) Solution?

Now... that should clear up a few things around here

Giving Semantics to Annotations
• External agreement on meaning of annotations
– Agree on meaning of a set of annotation tags
• E.g., Dublin Core
– Limited flexibility and extensibility
– Limited number of things can be expressed

• Use Ontologies to specify meaning of annotations

– Agree on language used to describe meaning
– Meanings of vocabularies of terms given by ontologies
• New terms can be formed by combining existing ones
• Meaning (semantics) of such terms is formally specified
• Can combine/relate terms in multiple ontologies
Ontologies
Ontology: Origins and History

• In Philosophy, fundamental branch of metaphysics

– Studies “being” or “existence” and their basic categories
– Aims to find out what entities and types of entities exist
Ontology in Information Science
• An ontology is an engineering artefact consisting of:
– A vocabulary used to describe (a particular view of) some
domain
– An explicit specification of the intended meaning of the
vocabulary.
• Often includes classification based information
– Constraints capturing background knowledge about the
domain

• Ideally, an ontology should:

– Capture a shared understanding of a domain of interest
– Provide a formal and machine manipulable model
Example Ontology (Protégé)
Applications of Ontologies
• e-Science, e.g., Bioinformatics
– Open Biomedical Ontologies Consortium (GO, MGED)
– Used e.g., for “in silico” investigations relating theory and data
• E.g., relating data on phosphatases to (model of) biological knowledge
Applications of Ontologies
• Medicine
– Building/maintaining terminologies such as Snomed, NCI & Galen

Central Sulcus
Parietal Lobe
Frontal Lobe
Occipital
LobeTemporal Lobe
Lateral Sulcus
Applications of Ontologies
• Organising complex and semi-structured information
– UN-FAO, NASA, Ordnance Survey, General Motors,
Lockheed Martin, …
Applications of Ontologies
• Military/Government
– DARPA, NSA, NIST, SAIC, MoD, Department of Homeland
Security, …
• The Semantic Web and so-called Semantic Grid
Ontology Languages
Ontology Languages for the Web
• Semantic Web effort led to development of “resource description”
language(s)
– E.g., RDF, and later RDF Schema (RDFS)
• RDFS is recognisable as an ontology language
– Classes and properties
– Sub/super-classes (and properties)
– Range and domain (of properties)
• But RDFS too weak to describe resources in sufficient detail, e.g.:
– No existence/cardinality constraints
– No transitive, inverse or symmetrical properties
– No localised range and domain constraints
– …
• And RDF(S) has “higher order flavour” with non-standard semantics
– Difficult to provide reasoning support
From RDFS to OWL
• Two languages developed to address deficiencies & problems of RDFS:
– OIL: developed by group of (largely) European researchers
– DAML-ONT: developed by group of (largely) US researchers
• Efforts merged to produce DAML+OIL
– Development carried out by “Joint EU/US Committee on Agent Markup
Languages”
• DAML+OIL submitted to as basis for standardisation
– Web-Ontology (WebOnt) Working Group formed
– WebOnt developed OWL language based on DAML+OIL
– OWL now a W3C recommendation (i.e., a standard)
• OIL, DAML+OIL and OWL based on Description Logics
– OWL is effectively a “Web-friendly” syntax for SHOIN
What Are Description Logics?
• A family of logic based Knowledge Representation
formalisms
– Descendants of semantic networks and KL-ONE
– Describe domain in terms of concepts (classes), roles
(properties, relationships) and individuals
– Operators allow for composition of complex concepts
– Names can be given to complex concepts, e.g.:

HappyParent ´ Parent u 8hasChild.(Intelligent t Athletic)

Semantics and Reasoning
• Distinguished by:
– Formal semantics (typically model theoretic)
• Decidable fragments of FOL (often contained in C2)
• Closely related to Propositional Modal & Dynamic Logics, and
to Guarded Fragment

Animal
IS-A
has-color
Cat Black
IS-A

Felix Mat
sits-on

[Quillian, 1967]
Semantics and Reasoning
• Distinguished by:
– Formal semantics (typically model theoretic)
• Decidable fragments of FOL (often contained in C2)
• Closely related to Propositional Modal & Dynamic Logics, and
to Guarded Fragment
– Provision of reasoning services
• Decision procedures for key problems
(satisfiability, subsumption, etc)
• Implemented systems (highly optimised)
Why Description Logic?
• OWL exploits results of 15+ years of DL research
– Well defined (model theoretic) semantics
Why Description Logic?
• OWL exploits results of 15+ years of DL research
– Well defined (model theoretic) semantics
– Formal properties well understood (complexity,
decidability)

I can’t find an efficient algorithm, but neither can all these famous people.

[Garey & Johnson. Computers and Intractability: A Guide

to the Theory of NP-Completeness. Freeman, 1979.]
Why Description Logic?
• OWL exploits results of 15+ years of DL research
– Well defined (model theoretic) semantics
– Formal properties well understood (complexity,
decidability)
– Known reasoning algorithms
Why Description Logic?
• OWL exploits results of 15+ years of DL research
– Well defined (model theoretic) semantics
– Formal properties well understood (complexity,
decidability)
– Known reasoning algorithms
– Implemented systems (highly optimised)

Pellet
Why Description Logic?
• Foundational research was crucial to design of OWL
– Informed Working Group decisions at every stage, e.g.:
• “Why not extend the language with feature x, which is clearly
harmless?”

• “Adding x would lead to undecidability - see proof in […]”

Why the Strange Names?
• Description Logics are a family of KR formalisms
– Mainly distinguished by available operators
• Available operators indicated by letters in name, e.g.,
S : basic DL (ALC) plus transitive roles (e.g., ancestor  R+)
H : role hierarchy (e.g., hasDaughter v hasChild)
O : nominals/singleton classes (e.g., {Italy})
I : inverse roles (e.g., isChildOf ´ hasChild–)
N : number restrictions (e.g., >2hasChild, 63hasChild)
• Basic DL + role hierarchy + nominals + inverse + NR = SHOIN
– SHOIN is the basis for W3C’s OWL Web Ontology Language
• SHOIN is very expressive, but still decidable (just)
Class/Concept Constructors

C is a concept (class); P is a role (property); x is an individual name

Knowledge Base / Ontology
• A TBox is a set of “schema” axioms (sentences), e.g.:
{Parent v Person u >1hasChild,
HappyParent ´ Parent u 8hasChild.(Intelligent t Athletic)}

• An ABox is a set of “data” axioms (ground facts), e.g.:

{John:HappyParent,
John hasChild Mary}

• An OWL ontology is just a SHOIN KB

OWL RDF/XML Exchange Syntax
E.g., Parent u 8hasChild.(Intelligent t Athletic):

<owl:Class>
<owl:intersectionOf rdf:parseType=" collection">
<owl:Class rdf:about="#Parent"/>
<owl:Restriction>
<owl:onProperty rdf:resource="#hasChild"/>
<owl:allValuesFrom>
<owl:unionOf rdf:parseType=" collection">
<owl:Class rdf:about="#Intelligent"/>
<owl:Class rdf:about="#Athletic"/>
</owl:unionOf>
</owl:allValuesFrom>
</owl:Restriction>
</owl:intersectionOf>
</owl:Class>
Why Ontology Reasoning?
• Given key role of ontologies in many applications, it is essential to
provide tools and services to help users:
– Design and maintain high quality ontologies, e.g.:
• Meaningful — all named classes can have instances
Why Ontology Reasoning?
• Given key role of ontologies in many applications, it is essential to
provide tools and services to help users:
– Design and maintain high quality ontologies, e.g.:
• Meaningful — all named classes can have instances
• Correct — captures intuitions of domain experts
Why Ontology Reasoning?
• Given key role of ontologies in many applications, it is essential to
provide tools and services to help users:
– Design and maintain high quality ontologies, e.g.:
• Meaningful — all named classes can have instances
• Correct — captures intuitions of domain experts
• Minimally redundant — no unintended synonyms


Banana split Banana sundae
Why Ontology Reasoning?
• Given key role of ontologies in many applications, it is essential to
provide tools and services to help users:
– Design and maintain high quality ontologies, e.g.:
• Meaningful — all named classes can have instances
• Correct — captures intuitions of domain experts
• Minimally redundant — no unintended synonyms
– Answer queries over ontology classes and instances, e.g.:
• Find more general/specific classes
• Retrieve individuals/tuples matching a given query
Research Challenges
Increasing Expressive Power
• Complex role inclusion axioms [Horrocks&Sattler, IJCAI-03]
– E.g., hasLocation ± partOf v hasLocation
• Concrete domains/datatypes, e.g., [Lutz, IJCAI-99; Pan et al, ISWC-03]
– E.g., value comparison (income > expenditure)
• Database style keys [Lutz et al, JAIR 2004]
– E.g., make + model + chassis-number is a key for Vehicles
• Rule language extensions
– First order extensions (e.g., SWRL) [Horrocks et al, JWS, 2005]
– Hybrid language extensions, e.g., [Eiter et al, KR-04; Motik et al, ISWC-04]
– LP/F-Logic/Common Logic [Chen et al, JLP, 1993; de Bruijn et al, WWW-05]
Improving Scalability
• Optimisation techniques
– Improve performance of DL reasoners, e.g., [Sirin et al, KR-06]
• Reduction to disjunctive Datalog [Motik et at, KR-04]
– Transform DL ontology to DatalogÇ rules
– Use LP techniques to deal with large numbers of ground facts
• Hybrid DL-DB systems [Horrocks et al, CADE-05]
– Use DB to store “Abox” (individual) axioms
– Cache inferences and use DB queries to answer/scope logical queries
• Polynomial time algorithms for sub-ALC logics [Baader et al, IJCAI-05]
– Graph based techniques for subsumption computation
Tools and Infrastructure
• Editors/environments
– Oiled, Protégé, Swoop, Construct, Ontotrack, …
Tools and Infrastructure
• Editors/environments
– Oiled, Protégé, Swoop, Construct, Ontotrack, …
• Reasoning systems
– Cerebra, FaCT++, Kaon2, Pellet, Racer, …

Pellet
Tools and Infrastructure
• Editors/environments
– Oiled, Protégé, Swoop, Construct, Ontotrack, …
• Reasoning systems
– Cerebra, FaCT++, Kaon2, Pellet, Racer, …
• Non-standard inferences
– Explanation, matching, least common subsumer, …
Tools and Infrastructure
• Editors/environments
– Oiled, Protégé, Swoop, Construct, Ontotrack, …
• Reasoning systems
– Cerebra, FaCT++, Kaon2, Pellet, Racer, …
• Non-standard inferences
– Explanation, matching, least common subsumer, …
• Design methodologies Entity
– Foundational ontologies,
modularisation, etc. Endurant Perdurant

Quality Substantial Event Stative

Achievement Accomplishment
Summary
• Semantic Web aims to make web content more
accessible to automated processes
– Adds semantic annotations to web resources

• Ontologies provide vocabulary for annotations

– Terms have well defined meaning

• OWL ontology language based on (description) logic

– Exploits results of basic research on complexity, reasoning,
etc.
• Many research challenges remain
– Including expressive power, scalability and tools
Acknowledgements
Thanks to my many friends in the DL and
Semantic Web communities, in particular:

– Alan Rector
– Franz Baader
– Uli Sattler
Resources
• FaCT++ system (open source)
– http://owl.man.ac.uk/factplusplus/

• Protégé
– http://protege.stanford.edu/plugins/owl/

• W3C Web-Ontology (WebOnt) working group (OWL)

– http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/WebOnt/

• DL Handbook, Cambridge University Press

– http://books.cambridge.org/0521781760.htm
Thank you for listening

Any questions?