Abstract. The Semantic Web is a powerful vision that is getting to grips with the challenge of providing more human-oriented web services. Hence, reasoning with and across distributed, partially implicit assumptions (contextual knowledge), is a milestone. Ontologies are a primary means to deploy the Semantic Web vision, but few work has been done on them to manage the context-dependency of Web knowledge. In this paper we introduce an ontology for representing a variety of reified contexts and states of affairs, called D&S, currently implemented as a plug-in to the DOLCE foundational ontology, and its application to two cases: an ontology for communication situations and roles, and an ontology for peer-to-peer communication. The reified contexts represented in D&S have a rich structure, and are a middleware between full-fledged formal contexts and theories, and the often poor vocabularies implemented in Web ontologies... 1

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We present a method and a tool, OntoLearn, aimed at the extraction of domain ontologies from web sites, and more generally from documents shared among the members of virtual organizations. OntoLearn first extracts a domain terminology from available documents. Then, complex domain terms are semantically interpreted and arranged in a hierarchical fashion. Finally, a general purpose ontology, i.e. WordNet, is trimmed and enriched with the detected domain concepts. The major novel aspect of this approach is semantic interpretation, that is, the association of a complex concept with a complex term. This involves finding the appropriate WordNet concept for each word of a terminological string and the appropriate conceptual relations that hold among the concept components. Semantic interpretation is based on a new WSD algorithm, called structural semantic interconnections.

Abstract. Annotations of multimedia documents typically have been pursued in two different directions. Either previous approaches have focused on low level descriptors, such as dominant color, or they have focused on the content dimension and corresponding annotations, such as person or vehicle. In this paper, we present a software environment to bridge between the two directions. M-OntoMat-Annotizer allows for linking low level MPEG-7 visual descriptions to conventional Semantic Web ontologies and annotations. We use M-OntoMat-Annotizer in order to construct ontologies that include prototypical instances of high-level domain concepts together with a formal specification of corresponding visual descriptors. Thus, we formalize the interrelationship of high- and low-level multimedia concept descriptions allowing for new kinds of multimedia content analysis and reasoning. 1

Information Content (IC) is an important dimension of word knowledge when assessing the similarity of two terms or word senses. The conventional way of measuring the IC of word senses is to combine knowledge of their hierarchical structure from an ontology like WordNet with statistics on their actual usage in text as derived from a large corpus. In this paper we present a wholly intrinsic measure of IC that relies on hierarchical structure alone. We report that this measure is consequently easier to calculate, yet when used as the basis of a similarity mechanism it yields judgments that correlate more closely with human assessments than other, extrinsic measures of IC that additionally employ corpus analysis.

Abstract. There are many problems requiring a semantic account of a database schema. At its best, such an account consists of mapping formulas between the schema and a formal conceptual model or ontology (CM) of the domain. This paper describes the underlying principles, algorithms, and a prototype of a tool which infers such semantic mappings when given simple correspondences from table columns in a relational schema to datatype properties of classes in an ontology. Although the algorithm presented is necessarily heuristic, we offer formal results stating that the answers returned are “correct ” for relational schemas designed according to standard Entity-Relationship techniques. We also report on experience in using the tool with public domain schemas and ontologies. 1

This paper concerns the idea of publishing heterogenous cultural content on the Semantic Web. By heterogenous content we mean metadata describing potentially any kind of cultural objects, including artifacts, photos, paintings, videos, folklore, cultural sites, cultural process descriptions, biographies, history etc. The metadata schemas used are different and the metadata may be represented at different levels of semantic granularity. This work is an extension to previous research on semantic cultural portals, such as MuseumFinland, that are usually based on a shared homogeneous schema, such as Dublin Core, and focus on content of similar kinds, such as artifacts. Our experiences suggest that a semantically richer event-based knowledge representation scheme than traditional metadata schemas is needed in order to support reasoning when performing semantic search and browsing. The new key idea is to transform different forms of metadata into event-based knowledge about the entities and events that take place in the world or in fiction. This approach facilitates semantic interoperability and reasoning about the world and stories at the same time, which enables implementation of intelligent services for the end-user. These ideas are addressed by presenting the vision and solution approaches taken in two prototype implementations of a new kind of cross-domain semantic cultural portal “CULTURESAMPO—Finnish Culture on the Semantic Web”.

Abstract. This paper presents the vision and results of creating a national level cross-domain ontology and ontology service infrastructure in Finland. The novelty of the infrastructure is based on two ideas. First, a system of open source core ontologies is being developed by transforming thesauri into mutually aligned lightweight ontologies, including a large top ontology that is extended by various domain specific ontologies. Second, the ONKI Ontology Server framework for publishing ontologies as ready to use services has been designed and implemented. ONKI provides legacy and other applications with ready to use functionalities for using ontologies on the HTML level by Ajax and semantic widgets. The idea is to use ONKI for creating mash-up applications in a way analogous to using Google or Yahoo Maps, but in our case external applications are mashed-up with ontology support. 1 A National Ontology Infrastructure The ambitious goal of the National Semantic Web Ontology project (FinnONTO 2003–2007) 1 [1] is to develop a semantic web infrastructure on a national level in Finland. The consortium behind the initiative—37 companies and public organizations—represents a wide spectrum of functions of the society, including libraries, health organizations, cultural institutions, government, media, and education. The project has produced a variety of scientific results, specifications, services, demonstrations, and applications: 1. Metadata standards. Nationally adapted standards for representing metadata in various application fields have been created, e.g. JHS 158 2 and [2]. 2. Core ontologies. Several core ontologies 3 have been developed in order to initiate ontology development processes in Finland.

Clarity in semantics and a rich formalization of this semantics are important requirements for ontologies designed to be deployed in large-scale, open, distributed systems such as the envisioned Semantic Web. This is especially important for the description of Web Services, which should enable complex tasks involving multiple agents. As one of the first initiatives of the Semantic Web community for describing Web Services, OWL-S attracts a lot of interest even though it is still under development. We identify problematic aspects of OWL-S and suggest enhancements through alignment to a foundational ontology. Another contribution of our work is the Core Ontology of Services that tries to fill the epistemological gap between the foundational ontology and OWL-S. It can be reused to align other Web Service description languages as well. Finally, we demonstrate the applicability of our work by aligning OWL-S' standard example called CongoBuy.

Large software systems are modularized in order to improve manageability. The parts of the software system communicate in order to achieve the desired functionality. To better understand, develop, manage, and maintain the resulting complexity, this paper presents a framework of ontologies. The ontologies range from very general, foundational ones to ontologies that elucidate the specificities of particular modularization and communication paradigms. We support two specific paradigms. First, we define an ontology for software components that may be used in traditional middleware architectures, e.g., application servers. Second, we specify an ontology for Web services. Through the reuse of existing foundational ontologies and our new Core Software Ontology, our proposal offers several advantages. In particular, it avoids the typical shortcomings related approaches exhibit and it allows for the concise definition of commonalities and differences of the two paradigms. 1