NATAN
Scripting environment for Creating and Managing Ontologies.
| Institution: | Institute of Informatics, SAS |
| Technologies used: | OWL-DL, Jena, Pellet |
| Inputs: | Ontological descriptions of offers |
| Outputs: | Ontological descriptions of offers |
| Documentation: | HTML, doc, JavaDoc |
| Distribution packages: | zip |
Addressed Problems
Maintaining ontologies involves performing some generic repetitive tasks, which requires to take semantic consistency into account. One of the possible sources of problems comes from the fact that the concepts are usually related to several other concepts. In addition, there are often some semantic dependencies between concepts or relationships. This means that the creation of new concepts can be tedious and difficult because it is repetitive and all of the semantic dependencies have to be met.
NATAN is a tool for creating and manipulating ontologies in a scripting environment (i.e. Python). The tool enables the possibility to join the many usefull libraries and features of the scripting environment, while being able to access and manipulate ontologies.
Description
There is an initial version of the tool and further progress is being made in integration with the Corporate Memory technologies.
The method of the tool are based on following principles:
- Mapping between object-oriented environment and ontologies is defined. It is based on accessing the conceptual and property axioms through object interface, which is similar to Smalltalk's object model. The system is backed-up by an OWL reasoner, which is used to store the knowledge base and infer the new facts upon query.
- Manipulation of the ontologies is performed based on calling the approriate methods of the object model, which in turn call the reasoner to resolve the queries and reflect the changes in the knowledge base.
- The object model can be seen as a wrapper for concepts and relations, which follows the set-theoretic semantics of the description logic version of the OWL.
The current implementation technologies include:
- Jena and Pellet OWL reasoner
- OWL-DL version of the OWL language
- RDQL and simple triple like queries from the Jena model.
References
- SETH: Semantic Python project at seth-scripting.sourceforge.net.
- Babik, M., Hluchy, L.: Deep integration of Python with Web Ontology Language, Semantic Scripting Workshop at 3rd European Semantic Web Conference, CEUR-WS, ISSN 1613-0073.
- Marian Babik. Scripting Environment for Creating and Managing Ontologies. In P.Navrat et al., editor, Tools for Acquisition, Organisation and Presenting of Information and Knowledge, Nizke Tatry, Slovakia, number 80-227-2468-8, pages 7985. Vydavatelstvo STU, Bratislava, 2006
- M. Babik and L. Hluchy. Deep Integration of Python with Semantic Web Technologies. Technical report, Presented at Europython 2006, CERN, Geneve, Switzerland, July 5, 2006