Extracting a subset of a given ontology that captures all the ontology's knowledge about a specified set of terms is a well-understood task. This task can be based, for instance, on locality-based modules. However, a single module does not allow us to understand neither topicality, connectedness, structure, or superfluous parts of an ontology, nor agreement between actual and intended modeling. The strong logical properties of locality-based modules suggest that the family of all such modules of an ontology can support comprehension of the ontology as a whole. However, extracting that family is not feasible, since the number of locality-based modules of an ontology can be exponential w.r.t. its size. In this paper we report on a new approach that enables us to efficiently extract a polynomial representation of the family of all locality-based modules of an ontology. We also describe the fundamental algorithm to pursue this task, and report on experiments carried out and results obtained.

Consequence-based ontology reasoning procedures have so far been known only for Horn ontology languages. A difficulty in extending such procedures is that non-Horn axioms seem to require reasoning by case, which causes non-determinism in tableau-based procedures. In this paper we present a consequence-based procedure for ALCH that overcomes this difficulty by using rules similar to ordered resolution to deal with disjunctive axioms in a deterministic way; it retains all the favourable attributes of existing consequence-based procedures, such as goal-directed “one pass” classification, optimal worst-case complexity, and “pay-asyou- go” behaviour. Our preliminary empirical evaluation suggests that the procedure scales well to non-Horn ontologies.

Matching large ontologies is a challenge due to the high time complexity. This paper proposes a new matching method for large ontologies based on reduction anchors. This method has a distinct advantage over the divide-and-conquer methods because it dose not need to partition large ontologies. In particular, two kinds of reduction anchors, positive and negative reduction anchors, are proposed to reduce the time complexity in matching. Positive reduction anchors use the concept hierarchy to predict the ignorable similarity calculations. Negative reduction anchors use the locality of matching to predict the ignorable similarity calculations. Our experimental results on the real world data sets show that the proposed method is efficient for matching large ontologies.

We consider a generalization of instance retrieval over knowledge bases that provides users with assertions in which descriptions of qualifying objects are given in addition to their identifiers. Notably, this involves a transfer of basic database paradigms involving caching and query rewriting in the context of an assertion retrieval algebra. We present an optimization framework for this algebra, with a focus on finding plans that avoid any need for general knowledge base reasoning at query execution time when sufficient cached results of earlier requests exist.

The Beth definability property, a well-known property from classical logic, is investigated in the context of description logics (DLs): if a general L-TBox implicitly defines an L-concept in terms of a given signature, where L is a DL, then does there always exist over this signature an explicit definition in L for the concept? This property has been studied before and used to optimize reasoning in DLs. In this paper a complete classification of Beth definability is provided for extensions of the basic DL ALC with transitive roles, inverse roles, role hierarchies, and/or functionality restrictions, both on arbitrary and on finite structures. Moreover, we present a tableau-based algorithm which computes explicit definitions of at most double exponential size. This algorithm is optimal because it is also shown that the smallest explicit definition of an implicitly defined concept may be double exponentially long in the size of the input TBox. Finally, if explicit definitions are allowed to be expressed in first-order logic then we show how to compute them in EXPTIME.

Thanks to the idea of social collaboration, Wikipedia has accumulated vast amount of semi-structured knowledge in which the link structure reflects human's cognition on semantic relationship to some extent. In this paper, we proposed a novel method RCRank to jointly compute concept-concept relatedness and concept-category relatedness base on the assumption that information carried in concept-concept links and concept-category links can mutually reinforce each other. Different from previous work, RCRank can not only find semantically related concepts but also interpret their relations by categories. Experimental results on concept recommendation and relation interpretation show that our method substantially outperforms classical methods.

We review recent results on inferencing for SROEL(×), a description logic that subsumes the main features of the W3C recommendation OWL EL. Rule-based deduction systems are developed for various reasoning tasks and logical sublanguages. Certain feature combinations lead to increased space upper bounds for materialisation, suggesting that efficient implementations are easier to obtain for suitable fragments of OWL EL.

The study proposes a framework of ONTOlogy-based Group Decision Support System (ONTOGDSS) for decision process which exhibits the complex structure of decision-problem and decision-group. It is capable of reducing the complexity of problem structure and group relations. The system allows decision makers to participate in group decision-making through the web environment, via the ontology relation. It facilitates the management of decision process as a whole, from criteria generation, alternative evaluation, and opinion interaction to decision aggregation. The embedded ontology structure in ONTOGDSS provides the important formal description features to facilitate decision analysis and verification. It examines the software architecture, the selection methods, the decision path, etc. Finally, the ontology application of this system is illustrated with specific real case to demonstrate its potentials towards decision-making development.

Although the notion of a concept as a collection of objects sharing certain properties, and the notion of a conceptual hierarchy are fundamental to both Formal Concept Analysis and Description Logics, the ways concepts are described and obtained differ significantly between these two research areas. Despite these differences, there have been several attempts to bridge the gap between these two formalisms, and attempts to apply methods from one field in the other. The present work aims to give an overview on the research done in combining Description Logics and Formal Concept Analysis.

The past year has seen a growing public awareness of the privacy risks of social networking through personal information that people voluntarily disclose. A spotlight has accordingly been turned on the disclosure policies of social networking sites and on mechanisms for restricting access to personal information on Facebook and other sites. But this is not sufficient to address privacy concerns in a world where Web-based data mining tools can let anyone infer information about others by combining data from multiple sources. To illustrate this, we are building a demonstration data miner, GlobalInferencer, that makes inferences about an individual?s lifestyle and other behavior. GlobalInferencer uses linked data technology to perform unified searches across Facebook, Flickr, and public data sites. It demonstrates that controlling access to personal information on individual social networking sites is not an adequate framework for protecting privacy, or even for supporting valid inferencing. In addition to access restrictions, there must be mechanisms for maintaining the provenance of information combined from multiple sources, for revealing the context within which information is presented, and for respecting the accountability that determines how information should be used.