An ontological approach to creating an Andean Weaving Knowledge Base

Andean textiles are products of one of the richest, oldest and continuous weaving traditions in the world. Understanding the knowledge and practice of textile production as a form of cultural heritage is particularly relevant in the Andean context due to erosion of clothing traditions, reuse of traditional textiles on commodities targeted at the tourism market, and loss of knowledge embedded in textile production. ``Weaving Communities of Practice'' was a pilot project that aimed to create a knowledge base of Andean weaving designed to contribute to curatorial practice and heritage policy. The research team gathered data on the chain of activities, instruments, resources, peoples, places and knowledge involved in the production of textiles, relating to over 700 textile samples. A major part of the project has been the modelling and representation of the knowledge of domain experts and information about the textile objects themselves in the form of an OWL ontology, and the development of a suite of search facilities to be supported by the ontology. This paper describes the research challenges faced in developing the ontology and search facilities, the methodology adopted, the design and implementation of the system, and the design and outcomes of a user evaluation of the system undertaken with a group of domain experts

Automated Theory Interpretation

This thesis presents novel methods from automated reasoning to find reusable knowledge and knowledge overlaps in large formalized knowledge bases. The focus is on formalized mathematics, but the methods are applicable on any kind of formalized content as long as the application of classical logic inference rules on this content is admissible. Formalized as well as traditional mathematics is advantageously organized in theories as its biggest knowledge units. As history of mathematics has shown, appearently unrelated theories happen to share a common core (i.e. knowledge overlap) once the concepts of each theories are translated appropriately. If all valid sentences of a theory A also hold in another theory B with an appropriate translation T, then A is said to be included in B -- or A can be interpreted in B. Since all sentences of a theory are derivable from a few of it, namely from its axioms, we know that A is included in B as soon as we have shown that the axioms of A hold in B. In this case all derivable sentences in A automatically hold in B too, i.e.the knowledge from A can be reused in B. In this thesis an algorithm for automated theory interpretation search is presented. It is based on semantic formula matching by means of normalization taken from term rewriting and a novel standardization technique for associative and commutative terms. Moreover, a practical notion of theory intersection is introduced and an algorithm for the construction of such intersections is presented. Both algorithms are implemented in a prototype system and experiments are conducted on the largest library of formalized mathematics -- the Mizar Mathematical Library -- which demonstrates the scalability of the algorithms and also reveal thousands of theory interpretations

Semantic-Web und Wikidata

Semantic-Web und Wikidata Eine Einführung in die Konzepte formaler Beschreibungs- und Abfragesprachen des SemanticWeb im Hinblick auf deren praktische Anwendung bei Wikidata.</p

Chinese whispers and connected alignments

This paper investigates the idea to treat repositories of ontologies as interlinked networks of ontologies, formally captured by the notion of a hyperontology. We apply standard matching algorithms to automatically create the linkage structure of the repository by performing pairwise matching. Subsequently, we define a modular work-flow to construct combinations of alignments for any finite number of ontologies. This workflow employs and makes interoperable several tools from the ontology engineering world, comprising matching, reasoning, and structuring tools, and supports in particular modular ontology extraction based on alignment, and a study and empirical analysis of (in)consistency propagation in connected alignments (the Chinese Whispers problem)

The OWL in the CASL: designing ontologies across logics

In this paper, we show how the web ontology language OWL can be accommodated within the larger framework of the heterogeneous common algebraic specification language HETCASL. Through this change in perspective, OWL can benefit from various useful HETCASL features concerning structuring, modularity, and heterogeneity. This tackles a major problem area in ontology engineering: re-use of ontologies and re-combination of ontological modules. We discuss in particular: (1) the extension of the Manchester syntax for OWL with structuring mechanisms of CASL, allowing for explicit modularisation (2) automatic translations between ontology languages to support ontology design across different ontology languages (heterogeneity) (3) heterogeneous ontology refinements, and corresponding automated reasoning support for different logic