Time is a concept that highly depends on the socio-cultural context. Its perception by humans is primarily based on the cultures, nations and social environment they belong to. Hence, different socio-cultural contexts imply different understandings of time. This leads to communication problems when their members start interacting with each other. In a dynamic and multi-cultural environment like today’s Web, where both billions of people with different socio-cultural contexts and numerous context dependent software applications interact, similar communication and inter-operability problems are expected. Expressing socio-cultural temporal information in an unambiguous, explicit and machine processable way can, however, help reduce such communication conflicts. In this way, heterogeneous temporal Web application systems can share the same concept of time. In this paper we present an ontology of socio-cultural time expressions that attempts to formalize the notion of socio-cultural time. The resulting model can then be used in a Web based temporal applications such as automated appointment scheduling services or calendars to provide more context sensitive service to its users.

Some of the top legal ontologies developed so far include the Functional Ontology for Law [FOLaw] The increasing need for legal information and content (Valente 1995), the Frame-Based Ontology (van Kralingen management caused by the growing amount of 1995), the LRI-Core ontology (Breuker 2004), unstructured (or poorly structured) legal data managed by DOLCE CLO [Core Legal Ontology] (Gangemi et al. legal publishing companies, law firms and public 2003), or the Ontology of Fundamental Concepts (Rubino administrations, or the increasing amount of legal et al. 2006, Sartor 2006) the basis for the LKIF-Core information directly available on the World Wide Web, Ontology (Breuker et al. 2007). Nevertheless, most legal have created an urgent need to construct conceptual ontologies are domain specific ontologies, which represent structures for knowledge representation to share and particular legal domains towards search, indexing and manage intelligently all this information, whilst making reasoning in a specific domain of national or European law human-machine communication and understanding (e.g. the IPRONTO ontology by Delgado et al. 2003, the possible.

A Digital Product Memory provides a digital diary of the complete product life cycle that is embedded in the product itself using smart wireless sensor technology. The data is hereby gathered by recording relevant ambient parameters in digital form. In this paper, we present the architecture and cost-efficient implementation of an autonomous digital product memory that generates and interprets its diary using rule-based reasoning methods. As we assume an open, heterogeneous sensor infrastructure, we rely on standard syntax and semantics provided by the Web Ontology Language OWL. The digital product memory collects and provides data using the OWL fragment OWL2 RL which can be processed with standard rule engines. As rule engine we use CLIPS on embedded hardware and exemplify the application of the digital product memory e.g. for predictive maintenance.

This paper is concern about developing a semantic agreement maintenance method based on semantic distance by calculating the change of local schema or ontology. This approach is important in dynamic and autonomous environment, in which the current approach assumed that agreement or mapping in static environment. The contribution of this research is to develop a framework based on semantic agreement maintenance approach for P2P environment. This framework based on two level hybrid P2P model architecture, which consist of two peer type: (1) super peer that use to register and manage the other peers, and (2) simple peer, as a simple peer, it exports and shares its contents with others. This research develop a model to maintain the semantic agreement in P2P environment, so the current approach which does not have the mechanism to know the change, since it assumed that ontology and local schema are in the static condition, and it is different in dynamic condition. The main issues are how to calculate the change of local schema or common ontology and the calculation result is used to determine which algorithm in maintaining the agreement. The experiment on the job matching domain in Indonesia have been done to show how far the performance of the approach. From the experiment, the main result are (i) the more change so the F-measure value tend to be decreased, (ii) there is no significant different in F-measure value for various modification type (add, delete, rename), and (iii) the correct choice of algorithm would improve the F-measure value.

In this paper we address an issue that has been brought to the attention of the database community with the advent of the Semantic Web, i.e. the issue of how ontologies (and semantics conveyed by them) can help solving typical database problems, through a better understanding of KR aspects related to databases. In particular, we investigate this issue from the ILP perspective by considering two database problems, (i) the definition of views and (ii) the definition of constraints, for a database whose schema is represented also by means of an ontology. Both can be reformulated as ILP problems and can benefit from the expressive and deductive power of the KR framework DL+log. We illustrate the application scenarios by means of examples. Keywords: Inductive Logic Programming, Relational Databases, Ontologies, Description Logics, Hybrid Knowledge Representation and Reasoning Systems. Note: To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP).

Description Logics (DLs) [2] are a logical reconstruction of the so-called frame-based knowledge representation languages, with the aim of providing a simple well-established Tarski-style declarative semantics to capture the meaning of the most popular features of structured representation of knowledge. Nowadays, DLs have gained even more popularity due to their application in 1 the context of the Semantic Web [4]. For example, the current standard language for specifying ontologies, the Web Ontology Language OWL is based on Description Logics. It is very natural to extend DLs to the fuzzy case in order to manage fuzzy/vague/imprecise pieces of knowledge for which a clear and precise definition is not possible. For a good and recent survey on the advances in the field of fuzzy DLs, we refer the reader to [14]. One of the challenges of the research in this community is the fact that different families of fuzzy operators (or fuzzy logics) lead to fuzzy DLs with different properties. In fuzzy logic, there are a lot of families of fuzzy operators (or fuzzy logics). Table 1 shows the connectives involved in what are considered the main four families. The most famous families correspond to the three basic continuous t-norms (i.e., Lukasiewicz, Gödel and Product [10]) together with an R-implication

The conceptual modelling built from text is rarely an ontology. As a matter of fact, such a conceptualization is corpus-dependent and does not offer the main properties we expect from ontology. Furthermore, ontology extracted from text in general does not match ontology defined by expert using a formal language. It is not surprising since ontology is an extra-linguistic conceptualization whereas knowledge extracted from text is the concern of textual linguistics. Incompleteness of text and using rhetorical figures, like ellipsis, modify the perception of the conceptualization we may have. Ontological knowledge, which is necessary for text understanding, is not in general embedded into documents.

The construction of a reference ontology for a large domain still remains an hard human task. The process is sometimes assisted by software tools that facilitate the information extraction from a textual corpus. Despite of the great use of XML Schema files on the internet and especially in the B2B domain, tools that offer a complete semantic analysis of XML schemas are really rare. In this paper we introduce Janus, a tool for automatically building a reference knowledge base starting from XML Schema files. Janus also provides different useful views to simplify B2B application integration.

Automatic annotation of documents with controlled vocabulary terms (descriptors) from a conceptual thesaurus is not only useful for document indexing and retrieval. The mapping of texts onto the same thesaurus furthermore allows to establish links between similar documents. This is also a substantial requirement of the Semantic Web. This paper presents an almost language-independent system that maps documents written in different languages onto the same multilingual conceptual thesaurus, EUROVOC. Conceptual thesauri differ from Natural Language Thesauri in that they consist of relatively small controlled lists of words or phrases with a rather abstract meaning. To automatically identify which thesaurus descriptors describe the contents of a document best, we developed a statistical, associative system that is trained on texts that have previously been indexed manually. In addition to describing the large number of empirically optimised parameters of the fully functional application, we present the performance of the software according to a human evaluation by professional indexers.

Outsourcing of complex IT infrastructure to IT service providers has increased substantially during the past years. IT service providers must be able to fulfil their service-quality commitments based upon predefined Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with the service customer. They need to manage, execute and maintain thousands of SLAs for different customers and different types of services, which needs new levels of flexibility and automation not available with the current technology. The complexity of contractual logic in SLAs requires new forms of knowledge representation to automatically draw inferences and execute contractual agreements. A logic-based approach provides several advantages including automated rule chaining allowing for compact knowledge representation as well as flexibility to adapt to rapidly changing business requirements. We suggest adequate logical formalisms for representation and enforcement of SLA rules and describe a proof-of-concept implementation. The article describes selected formalisms of the ContractLog KR and their adequacy for automated SLA management and presents results of experiments to demonstrate flexibility and scalability of the approach.