In recent years the development of ontologies—explicit formal specifications of the terms in the domain and relations among them (Gruber 1993)—has been moving from the realm of Artificial-Intelligence laboratories to the desktops of domain experts. Ontologies have become common on the World-Wide Web. The ontologies on the Web range from large taxonomies categorizing Web sites (such as on Yahoo!) to categorizations of products for sale and their features (such as on Amazon.com). The WWW Consortium (W3C) is developing the Resource Description Framework (Brickley and Guha 1999), a language for encoding knowledge on Web pages to make it understandable to electronic agents searching for information. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), in conjunction with the W3C, is developing DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML) by extending RDF with more expressive constructs aimed at facilitating agent interaction on the Web (Hendler and McGuinness 2000). Many disciplines now develop standardized ontologies that domain experts can use to share and annotate information in their fields. Medicine, for example, has produced large, standardized, structured vocabularies such as SNOMED (Price and Spackman 2000) and the semantic network of the Unified Medical Language System (Humphreys and Lindberg 1993). Broad general-purpose ontologies are

Description logics are a family of knowledge representation formalisms that are descended from semantic networks and frames via the system Kl-one. During the last decade, it has been shown that the important reasoning problems (like subsumption and satisfiability) in a great variety of description logics can be decided using tableau-like algorithms. This is not very surprising since description logics have turned out to be closely related to propositional modal logics and logics of programs (such as propositional dynamic logic), for which tableau procedures have been quite successful. Nevertheless, due to different underlying intuitions and applications, most description logics differ significantly from run-of-the-mill modal and program logics. Consequently, the research on tableau algorithms in description logics led to new techniques and results, which are, however, also of interest for modal logicians. In this article, we will focus on three features that play an important role in description logics (number restrictions, terminological axioms, and role constructors), and show how they can be taken into account by tableau algorithms.

We consider different methods of optimizing the classification process of terminological representation systems, and evaluate their effect on three different types of test data. Though these techniques can probably be found in many existing systems, until now there has been no coherent description of these techniques and their impact on the performance of a system. One goal of this paper is to make such a description available for future implementors of terminological systems. Building the optimizations that came off best into the kris system greatly enhanced its efficiency.

This thesis is an inquiry into the nature of the high-level, rhetorical structure of unrestricted natural language texts, computational means to enable its derivation, and two applications (in automatic summarization and natural language generation) that follow from the ability to build such structures automatically. The thesis proposes a first-order formalization of the high-level, rhetorical structure of text. The formalization assumes that text can be sequenced into elementary units; that discourse relations hold between textual units of various sizes; that some textual units are more important to the writer's purpose than others; and that trees are a good approximation of the abstract structure of text. The formalization also introduces a linguistically motivated compositionality criterion, which is shown to hold for the text structures that are valid. The thesis proposes, analyzes theoretically, and compares empirically four algorithms for determining the valid text structures of ...

The family of terminological representation systems has its roots in the representation system kl-one. Since the development of kl-one more than a dozen similar representation systems have been developed by various research groups. These systems vary along a number of dimensions. In this paper, we present the results of an empirical analysis of six such systems. Surprisingly, the systems turned out to be quite diverse, leading to problems when transporting knowledge bases from one system to another. Additionally, the runtime performance between different systems and knowledge bases varied more than we expected. Finally, our empirical runtime performance results give an idea of what runtime performance to expect from such representation systems. These findings complement previously reported analytical results about the computational complexity of reasoning in such systems.

Number restrictions are concept constructors that are available in almost all implemented Description Logic systems. However, they are mostly available only in a rather weak form, which considerably restricts their expressive power. On the one hand, the roles that may occur in number restrictions are usually of a very restricted type, namely atomic roles or complex roles built using either intersection or inversion. In the present paper, we increase the expressive power of Description Logics by allowing for more complex roles in number restrictions. As role constructors, we consider composition of roles (which will be present in all our logics) and intersection, union, and inversion of roles in different combinations. We will present two decidability results (for the basic logic that extends ALC by number restrictions on roles with composition, and for one extension of this logic), and three undecidability results for three other extensions of the basic logic. On the other hand, with t...

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The European Galen project aims to promote the sharing and re-use of medical data by providing a concept model which can be used by application designers as a flexible and extensible classification schema. A description logic style terminological knowledge representation system called Grail has been developed specifically for this task. Using a description logic based schema has a number of important benefits including coherence checking, schema enrichment and query optimisation. In order to support a variety of design requirements Grail includes transitive closure of roles and general concept inclusions. Replacing the Grail classifier’s existing structural subsumption algorithm with a sound, provably complete and decidable tableaux calculus based algorithm would have many attractions if the intractability problem could be mitigated by suitable optimisations. The optimisation of non-deterministic constraint expansion would be of particular importance as large numbers of these constraints can be introduced by general concept inclusions. Both intelligent back-tracking and the use of meta-knowledge to guide constraint expansion are being studied as possible methods of tackling this problem.

The tradeoff between expressiveness and tractability in Description Logics (DLs) has long been recognised [9]. For DL system designers and implementors there are several possible approaches to this problem [3]. These

Object-oriented class libraries offer the potential for individual researchers to manage the large bodies of code generated in the experimental development of complex interactive systems. This article analyzes the structure of such a class library that supports the rapid prototyping of a wide range of systems including collaborative networking, shared documents, hypermedia, machine learning, knowledge acquisition and knowledge representation, and various combinations of these technologies. The overall systems architecture is presented in terms of a heterogeneous collection of systems providing a wide range of application functionalities. Examples are given of group writing, multimedia and knowledge-based systems which are based on combining these functionalities. The detailed design issues of the knowledge representation server component of the system are analyzed in terms of requirements, current state-of-the-art, and the underlying theoretical principles that lead to an effective obj...