Copyright © 2004 DERI®, All Rights Reserved. DERI liability, trademark, document use, and software licensing rules apply.
this document is available as a non normative PDF version
The ontology mapping tool will be part of the Ontology Management System, it have to communicate the other modules of the system.. More importantly, it can benefit from the features offered by other tools in the ontology management suite. With this requirement this tool contributes to the overall interoperability and compatibility requirement for the tool suite. Deliverable 4, Section 2 situates the versioning tool in the OMS framework.
This tool will interoperate with the versionning tool, to store and retrieve the mappings and the merged ontologies, and of course to work with different version of ontologies to mediate.
A runtime module will also be developped, following the requirements specified in the SWWS project, deliverable 5.2.
The mediation should be able to work with different ontology languages. A generic ontology language conversion tool wich mediates between different ontology languages will be a general tool of the OMS. This tool will be elaborated on the basis of ORDI.
This module is dealing with mapping algorithms. As these algorithms are currently fast evolving and research in this area is very active, we expect the mediation tool to include an API supporting the implementation of different algorithms. With this possibility, the mediation tool will be able to follow the evolution of the research area.
In this section we elaborate the functional requirements from a research point of view. For a detailed implementation priority list with respect to these requirements we refer to Section 4.
Core Requirements for a powerful mapping-language are:
• The basis is a powerful rule language.
• The rule language needs a rich set of (possibly extendable) built-in
predicates.
• The rule language needs aggregate functions.
The mapping language consists amongst others of aggregate functions and built-in
predicates.
Patterns are templates that match the more usual mismatches between two ontologies.
The use of predefined patterns considerably reduces the mapping designer task.
In this solution we propose the use of a pattern language to define them, a
pattern library allowing storing and retrieving them efficiently.
The architecture of the module allows the use of different mapping algorithms. These algorithms are stored and can be combined to create efficient mappings. The interface specifies the ontology language in input and the mapping language in output. This will provide support for the evolution of the research in ontology mediation.
This fuction uses a mapping to merge two ontologies schemas and instances. It will include parameters to specify the mapping to use and the range of the merging (wether the instances are also merged or not)
This interface plays the main role in the mapping module. It allows the user
to graphically create or modify mappings by linking similar entities. Mapping
proposals as results of the mapping algorithms are also integrated in this part
of the component. We will detail the GUI in chapter 3 of this
deliverable.
This module is used by the reasoning part of the ontology management system.
It can also be implemented as a web service but we won’t discuss this
here.
This module uses the mappings to perform the following tasks:
Used to rewrite a query written for an ontology into one for another ontology. This process uses the mapping between the two ontologies or proposes to create one using the mapping module.
Used to transform instances from one ontology to another. This process also uses the mapping between the two ontologies.
Link to the ontology repository (ORDI) to store and retrieve mappings, mapping patterns and merged ontologies.
A graphical tool to realize manual mappings between two ontologies. The interface allows the user to select entities from the ontologies and to apply a pattern on them. This interface uses some modules of the Ontology Editing and Browsing tool (see D8.1).
This interface provides pattern management tools, such as editing and browsing of patterns, storage and retreival of pattern.
This interface provides a list of matching algorithms. The user can select an algorithm and two ontologies and execute the algorithm. the user may then validate the proposals of the algorihtm.
For the implementation we have distinguished three phases:
The Vs indicate in which phase which requirement is being initially tackled.
| Req. ID. | Versioning Requirement | Version 1 | Version 2 | Version 3 | Priority |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| V1 | Interoperability/Compatibility | V | (affects all implementation) | ||
| V2 | Genericity | V | (affects all implementation) | ||
| V3 | Mapping Language | V | HIGHEST | ||
| V4 | Mapping Patterns | V | HIGHEST | ||
| V5 | Manual Mapping Interface | V | HIGHEST | ||
| V6 | Merging function | V | HIGHEST | ||
| V7 | Links to the repository | V | HIGH | ||
| V8 | Mapping Algorithms API | V | HIGH | ||
| V9 | Runtime Module | V | HIGH | ||
| V10 | Mapping Algorithms Research | V | LOW |
The mediation component will in a close future integrate a mapping language and a mapping patterns management tool as part of a manual graphical mapping environment. It will also include a pogramming interface, allowing to plug different mapping algorithms, this making the mediation component able to follow the evolution of research in this area. This component will be linked with others parts, the whole being a homogeneous Ontology Management System.
The work is funded by the European Commission under the projects DIP, Knowledge Web, Ontoweb, SEKT, SWWS, Esperonto and h-TechSight; by Science Foundation Ireland under the DERI-Lion project; and by the Vienna city government under the CoOperate programme.
The authors would like to thank to all the members of the OMWG working group for their advices and inputs to this document.
$Date: 2004/10/22 16:12:55 $