Vehicles in public traffic that are equipped with Automated Driving Systems are subject to a number of expectations: Among other aspects, their behavior should be safe, conforming to the rules of the road and provide mobility to their users. This poses challenges for the developers of such systems: Developers are responsible for specifying this behavior, for example, in terms of requirements at system design time. As we will discuss in the article, this specification always involves the need for assumptions and trade-offs. As a result, insufficiencies in such a behavior specification can occur that can potentially lead to unsafe system behavior. In order to support the identification of specification insufficiencies, requirements and respective assumptions need to be made explicit. In this article, we propose the Semantic Norm Behavior Analysis as an ontology-based approach to specify the behavior for an Automated Driving System equipped vehicle. We use ontologies to formally represent specified behavior for a targeted operational environment, and to establish traceability between specified behavior and the addressed stakeholder needs. Furthermore, we illustrate the application of the Semantic Norm Behavior Analysis in a German legal context with two example scenarios and evaluate our results. Our evaluation shows that the explicit documentation of assumptions in the behavior specification supports both the identification of specification insufficiencies and their treatment. Therefore, this article provides requirements, terminology and an according methodology to facilitate ontology-based behavior specifications in automated driving.
In this paper, we propose a first-order ontology for generalized stratified order structure. We then classify the models of the theory using model-theoretic techniques. An ontology mapping from this ontology to the core theory of Process Specification Language is also discussed.
We present a new approach to dialogue specification for Virtual Personal Assistants (VPAs) based on so-called dialogue workflow graphs, with several demonstrated advantages over current ontology-based methods. Our new dialogue specification language (DSL) enables customers to more easily participate in the VPA modeling process due to a user-friendly modeling framework. Resulting models are also significantly more compact. VPAs can be developed much more rapidly. The DSL is a new modeling layer on top of our ontology-based Dialogue Management (DM) framework OntoVPA. We explain the rationale and…
Universität Bremen（不来梅大学）；Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg（奥托·冯·格里克马格德堡大学）
Generic Ontology Design Patterns, GODPs, are defined in Generic DOL, an extension of DOL, the Distributed Ontology, Model and Specification Language, and implemented using Heterogeneous Tool Set. Parameters such as classes, properties, individuals, or whole ontologies may be instantiated with arguments in a host ontology. The potential of Generic DOL is illustrated with GODPs for an example from the literature, namely the Role design pattern. We also discuss how larger GODPs may be composed by instantiating smaller GODPs.
In this paper we present a textual description, in terms of Description Logics, of the BPMN Ontology, which provides a clear semantic formalisation of the structural components of the Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN), based on the latest stable BPMN specifications from OMG [BPMN Version 1.1 -- January 2008]. The development of the ontology was guided by the description of the complete set of BPMN Element Attributes and Types contained in Annex B of the BPMN specifications.
University of California, Santa Barbara（加利福尼亚大学圣巴巴拉分校）；Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；CSIRO（澳大利亚联邦科学与工业研究组织）；Ecole des Mines de Saint-Etienne（圣艾蒂安国立高等矿业学校）
The Sensor, Observation, Sample, and Actuator (SOSA) ontology provides a formal but lightweight general-purpose specification for modeling the interaction between the entities involved in the acts of observation, actuation, and sampling. SOSA is the result of rethinking the W3C-XG Semantic Sensor Network (SSN) ontology based on changes in scope and target audience, technical developments, and lessons learned over the past years. SOSA also acts as a replacement of SSN's Stimulus Sensor Observation (SSO) core. It has been developed by the first joint working group of the Open Geospatial Consorti…
In the knowledge engineering community "ontology" is usually defined in the tradition of Gruber as an "explicit specification of a conceptualization". Several variations of this definition exist. In the paper we argue that (with one notable exception) these definitions are of no explanatory value, because they violate one of the basic rules for good definitions: The defining statement (the definiens) should be clearer than the term that is defined (the definiendum). In the paper we propose a different definition of "ontology" and discuss how it helps to explain various phenomena: the ability o…
EBM WebSourcing；Université de Toulouse-Mines d’Albi（图卢兹-阿尔比矿业大学）
This paper presents an ontology-based approach for the design of a collaborative business process model (CBP). This CBP is considered as a specification of needs in order to build a collaboration information system (CIS) for a network of organisations. The study is a part of a model driven engineering approach of the CIS in a specific enterprise interoperability framework that will be summarised. An adaptation of the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is used to represent the CBP model. We develop a knowledge-based system (KbS) which is composed of three main parts: knowledge gathering,…
University of Bremen（不来梅大学）；German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)（德国人工智能研究中心）；Otto-von-Guericke University of Magdeburg（马格德堡奥托·冯·格里克大学）
Generic ontologies were introduced as an extension (Generic DOL) of the Distributed Ontology, Modeling and Specification Language, DOL, with the aim to provide a language for Generic Ontology Design Patterns. In this paper we present a number of new language constructs that increase the expressivity and the generality of Generic DOL, among them sequential and optional parameters, list parameters with recursion, and local sub-patterns. These are illustrated with non-trivial patterns: generic value sets and (nested) qualitatively graded relations, demonstrated as definitional building blocks in …
Despite the current interest in Open Data publishing, a formal and comprehensive methodology supporting an organization in deciding which data to publish and carrying out precise procedures for publishing high-quality data, is still missing. In this paper we argue that the Ontology-based Data Management paradigm can provide a formal basis for a principled approach to publish high quality, semantically annotated Open Data. We describe two main approaches to using an ontology for this endeavor, and then we present some technical results on one of the approaches, called bottom-up, where the speci…
DIAG, Sapienza, University of Rome（罗马大学萨皮恩扎校区DIAG学院（DIAG, Sapienza, University of Rome））
In today's large enterprises there is a significant increasing trend in the amount of data that has to be stored and processed. To complicate this scenario the complexity of organizing and managing a large collection of data, structured according to a single, unified schema, makes so that there is almost never a single place where to look to satisfy an information need. The Ontology-Based Data Access (OBDA) paradigm aims at mitigating this phenomenon by providing to the users of the system a unified and shared conceptual view of the domain of interest (ontology), while still enabling the data …
Most definitions of ontology, viewed as a "specification of a conceptualization", agree on the fact that if an ontology can take different forms, it necessarily includes a vocabulary of terms and some specification of their meaning in relation to the domain's conceptualization. And as domain knowledge is mainly conveyed through scientific and technical texts, we can hope to extract some useful information from them for building ontology. But is it as simple as this? In this article we shall see that the lexical structure, i.e. the network of words linked by linguistic relationships, does not n…
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院）
Ontologies order and interconnect knowledge of a certain field in a formal and semantic way so that they are machine-parsable. They try to define allwhere acceptable definition of concepts and objects, classify them, provide properties as well as interconnect them with relations (e.g. "A is a special case of B"). More precisely, Tom Gruber defines Ontologies as a "specification of a conceptualization; [...] a description (like a formal specification of a program) of the concepts and relationships that can exist for an agent or a community of agents." [1] An Ontology is made of Individuals whic…
This report describes a new version of the OntoSpec methodology for ontology building. Defined by the LaRIA Knowledge Engineering Team (University of Picardie Jules Verne, Amiens, France), OntoSpec aims at helping builders to model ontological knowledge (upstream of formal representation). The methodology relies on a set of rigorously-defined modelling primitives and principles. Its application leads to the elaboration of a semi-informal ontology, which is independent of knowledge representation languages. We recently enriched the OntoSpec methodology by endowing it with a new resource, the DO…
Enterprise information systems have adopted Web-based foundations for exchanges between heterogeneous programmes. These programs provide and consume via Web APIs some resources identified by URIs, whose representations are transmitted via HTTP. Furthermore HTTP remains at the heart of all Web developments (Semantic Web, linked data, IoT...). Thus, situations where a program must be able to reason about HTTP interactions (request-response) are multiplying. This requires an explicit formal specification of a shared conceptualization of those interactions. A proposal for an RDF vocabulary exists,…
Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California（南加州大学信息科学研究所）
In recent years, Semantic Web technologies have been increasingly adopted by researchers, industry and public institutions to describe and link data on the Web, create web annotations and consume large knowledge graphs like Wikidata and DBPedia. However, there is still a knowledge gap between ontology engineers, who design, populate and create knowledge graphs; and web developers, who need to understand, access and query these knowledge graphs but are not familiar with ontologies, RDF or SPARQL. In this paper we describe the Ontology-Based APIs framework (OBA), our approach to automatically cr…
The sharing of ontologies between diverse communities of discourse allows them to compare their own information structures with that of other communities that share a common terminology and semantics - ontology sharing facilitates interoperability between online knowledge organizations. This paper demonstrates how ontology sharing is formalizable within the conceptual knowledge model of Information Flow (IF). Information Flow indirectly represents sharing through a specifiable, ontology extension hierarchy augmented with synonymic type equivalencing - two ontologies share terminology and meani…
AIdentifyAGE Ontology for Decision Support in Forensic Dental Age Assessment
InESC-ID Lisboa（里斯本INESC-ID）；Instituto Superior Técnico（技术学院）；Faculdade de Medicina Dentária da Universidade de Lisboa（里斯本大学牙医学院）；FCiências.ID - Centro de Estatística e Aplicações da Universidade de Lisboa (CEAUL)（里斯本大学FCiências.ID）；Instituto Politécnico de Leiria - Escola Superior de Tecnologia e Gestão（莱里亚技术学院）；IST-ID；Instituto Superior de Engenharia de Lisboa（里斯本工程学院）
3D city models - which represent in 3 dimensions the geometric elements of a city - are increasingly used for an intended wide range of applications. Such uses are made possible by using semantically enriched 3D city models and by presenting such enriched 3D city models in a way that allows decision-making processes to be carried out from the best choices among sets of objectives, and across issues and scales. In order to help in such a decision-making process we have defined a framework to find the best visualization technique(s) for a set of potentially heterogeneous data that have to be vis…
Change management for evolving collaborative business process development is crucial when the business logic, transections and workflow change due to changes in business strategies or organizational and technical environment. During the change implementation, business processes are analyzed and improved ensuring that they capture the proposed change and they do not contain any undesired functionalities or change side-effects. This paper presents Business Process Change Management approach for the efficient and effective implementation of change in the business process. The key technology behin…
ROSS ("Representation, Ontology, Structure, Star") is introduced as a new method for knowledge representation that emphasizes representational constructs for physical structure. The ROSS representational scheme includes a language called "Star" for the specification of ontology classes. The ROSS method also includes a formal scheme called the "instance model". Instance models are used in the area of natural language meaning representation to represent situations. This paper provides both the rationale and the philosophical background for the ROSS method.
Montclair State University（蒙特克莱尔州立大学）；Covenant University（圣约大学）
The ability of a system to meet its requirements is a strong determinant of success. Thus effective requirements specification is crucial. Explicit Requirements are well-defined needs for a system to execute. IMplicit Requirements (IMRs) are assumed needs that a system is expected to fulfill though not elicited during requirements gathering. Studies have shown that a major factor in the failure of software systems is the presence of unhandled IMRs. Since relevance of IMRs is important for efficient system functionality, there are methods developed to aid the identification and management of IM…
The ROSS method is a new approach in the area of knowledge representation that is useful for many artificial intelligence and natural language understanding representation and reasoning tasks. (ROSS stands for "Representation", "Ontology", "Structure", "Star" language). ROSS is a physical symbol-based representational scheme. ROSS provides a complex model for the declarative representation of physical structure and for the representation of processes and causality. From the metaphysical perspective, the ROSS view of external reality involves a 4D model, wherein discrete single-time-point unit-…
Artifact-Centric systems have emerged in the last years as a suitable framework to model business-relevant entities, by combining their static and dynamic aspects. In particular, the Guard-Stage-Milestone (GSM) approach has been recently proposed to model artifacts and their lifecycle in a declarative way. In this paper, we enhance GSM with a Semantic Layer, constituted by a full-fledged OWL 2 QL ontology linked to the artifact information models through mapping specifications. The ontology provides a conceptual view of the domain under study, and allows one to understand the evolution of the …
Ontologies are a popular way of representing domain knowledge, in particular, knowledge in domains related to life sciences. (Semi-)automating the process of building an ontology has attracted researchers from different communities into a field called "Ontology Learning". We provide a formal specification of the exact and the probably approximately correct learning models from computational learning theory. Then, we recall from the literature complexity results for learning lightweight description logic (DL) ontologies in these models. Finally, we highlight other approaches proposed in the lit…
Institute AIFB, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院AIFB研究所）
We present an ontology for representing workflows over components with Read-Write Linked Data interfaces and give an operational semantics to the ontology via a rule language. Workflow languages have been successfully applied for modelling behaviour in enterprise information systems, in which the data is often managed in a relational database. Linked Data interfaces have been widely deployed on the web to support data integration in very diverse domains, increasingly also in scenarios involving the Internet of Things, in which application behaviour is often specified using imperative programmi…
MSLE: An ontology for Materials Science Laboratory Equipment. Large-Scale Devices for Materials Characterization
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院）；Helmholtz Institute Ulm for Electrochemical Energy Storage (HIU)（乌尔姆亥姆霍兹电化学储能研究所）；Technical University Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）
Wright State University（莱特州立大学）；University of California, Santa Barbara（加州大学圣巴巴拉分校）；Kansas State University（堪萨斯州立大学）；Hydronos Labs（海德罗诺斯实验室）；University of Vienna（维也纳大学）；Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学）；University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Michigan State University（密歇根州立大学）
Free University of Bozen-Bolzano（博尔扎诺自由大学）；Sapienza Università di Roma（罗马第一大学）；University of Genova（热那亚大学）
Ontology-based data access (OBDA) is a novel paradigm facilitating access to relational data, realized by linking data sources to an ontology by means of declarative mappings. DL-Lite_R, which is the logic underpinning the W3C ontology language OWL 2 QL and the current language of choice for OBDA, has been designed with the goal of delegating query answering to the underlying database engine, and thus is restricted in expressive power. E.g., it does not allow one to express disjunctive information, and any form of recursion on the data. The aim of this paper is to overcome these limitations of…
McGill University（麦吉尔大学）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Desautels Faculty of Management, McGill University（麦吉尔大学德索泰尔管理学院）；McGill Center for the Convergence in Health and Economics (MCCHE)（麦吉尔健康与经济融合中心）；Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, McGill University（麦吉尔大学流行病学与生物统计学系）
The purpose of this paper is to describe and analyze the development of a knowledge-based infrastructure to support MSP decision-making processes. The paper emerged from a study to define specifications for a knowledge-based infrastructure to provide decision support for community-level MSPs in the Canadian province of Quebec. As part of the study, a process assessment was conducted to understand the needs of communities as they collect, organize, and analyze data to make decisions about their priorities. The result of this process is a portrait, which is an epidemiological profile of health a…
University of Vermont Larner College of Medicine（佛蒙特大学拉纳医学院）
The Machine Assisted Generation, Comparison, and Calibration (MAGCC) framework provides machine assistance and automation of recurrent crucial steps and processes in the development, implementation, testing, and use of scientific simulation models. MAGCC bridges systems for knowledge extraction via natural language processing or extracted from existing mathematical models and provides a comprehensive workflow encompassing the composition of scientific models and artificial intelligence (AI) assisted code generation. MAGCC accomplishes this through: 1) the development of a comprehensively expre…
Deakin University（迪肯大学）；School of Information Technology（信息技术学院）
In this paper, we propose a new mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model ontology and a novel constraint typology of MILP formulations. MILP is a commonly used mathematical programming technique for modelling and solving real-life scheduling, routing, planning, resource allocation, and timetabling optimization problems providing optimized business solutions for industry sectors such as manufacturing, agriculture, defence, healthcare, medicine, energy, finance, and transportation. Despite the numerous real-life Combinatorial Optimization Problems found and solved and millions yet to be dis…
A Neuro-Symbolic Framework for Accountability in Public-Sector AI
University of Maryland College Park MD USA；The Hebrew University of Jerusalem \& University of Maryland Jerusalem Israel；University of Maryland；The Hebrew University of Jerusalem \& University of Maryland
IMC, PUC Chile（智利天主教大学IMC）；IMFD Chile（智利数学建模研究所）；Universitat Pompeu Fabra（庞培法布拉大学）；University of Bremen（不来梅大学）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）
Ontology-mediated querying and querying in the presence of constraints are two key database problems where tuple-generating dependencies (TGDs) play a central role. In ontology-mediated querying, TGDs can formalize the ontology and thus derive additional facts from the given data, while in querying in the presence of constraints, they restrict the set of admissible databases. In this work, we study the limits of efficient query evaluation in the context of the above two problems, focussing on guarded and frontier-guarded TGDs and on UCQs as the actual queries. We show that a class of ontology-…
Software requirements specification is undoubtedly critical for the whole software life-cycle. Nowadays, writing software requirements specifications primarily depends on human work. Although massive studies have been proposed to fasten the process via proposing advanced elicitation and analysis techniques, it is still a time-consuming and error-prone task that needs to take domain knowledge and business information into consideration. In this paper, we propose an approach, named ReqGen, which can provide recommendations by automatically generating natural language requirements specifications …
Ontologies serve as a one of the formal means to represent and model knowledge in computer science, electrical engineering, system engineering and other related disciplines. Ontologies within requirements engineering may be used for formal representation of system requirements. In the Internet of Things, ontologies may be used to represent sensor knowledge and describe acquired data semantics. Designing an ontology comprehensive enough with an appropriate level of knowledge expressiveness, serving multiple purposes, from system requirements specifications to modeling knowledge based on data fr…
Systems Engineering Research Center (SERC), Stevens Institute of Technology（史蒂文斯理工学院系统工程研究中心）；Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University（弗吉尼亚理工学院暨州立大学）
Engineered solutions are becoming more complex and multi-disciplinary in nature. This evolution requires new techniques to enhance design and analysis tasks that incorporate data integration and interoperability across various engineering tool suites spanning multiple domains at different abstraction levels. Semantic Web Technologies (SWT) offer data integration and interoperability benefits as well as other opportunities to enhance reasoning across knowledge represented in multiple disparate models. This paper introduces the Digital Engineering Framework for Integration and Interoperability (…
Natural language is understandable by human and not machine. None technical persons can only use natural language to specify their business requirements. However, the current version of Business process management and notation (BPMN) tools do not allow business analysts to implement their business processes without having technical skills. BPMN tool is a tool that allows users to design and implement the business processes by connecting different business tasks and rules together. The tools do not provide automatic implementation of business tasks from users' specifications in natural language…
