Realizing the potential of reference ontologies for the semantic web Jim Brinkley June 29, 2007

Motivation Large number of application ontologies Need to link them together into the semantic web Reference ontologies as one way to do this But reference ontologies are (or will be) too large for practical use How can reference ontologies be made practical for applications, yet retain potential to link application ontologies?

Approach Application ontologies as views over one or more reference ontologies A view is a query that defines a formal transformation from one or more source ontologies to a target application ontology

Main advantage of views View query describes the specific operations used to create the application ontology –Therefore the connection to the source(s) are not lost –If the query can be made bidirectional (a mapping) then application ontologies can be related to each other via views

Secondary advantages View query can be re-run at any time as the reference ontology changes The query is formal so can be manipulated by a GUI Application ontology need not be materialized, so the update problem is not an issue (but there may be other reasons to materialize views)

VGen R1 W1 V1 A1 VQP Basic Architecture

VGen R1 W1 VGen Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 V1 A1 VQP V2 A2 VQP R2 W2

Web Services FMA PRO Ontologies Query & Visualization Services Editors & Tools VQP Wrappers VGen Presentation Layer Service Layer Data and Knowledge Layer

Problems to solve (aims) 1.How to define the view 2.How to implement the view query processor 3.How to graphically generate views

R1 FMA (ref) R1 FMA (ref) R2 PRO (ref) R2 PRO (ref) physiologist Use case 1: RadLex A1 CV anatomy (app) A1 CV anatomy (app) anatomist VGen A2 CV physiology (app) A2 CV physiology (app) Use case 3: simulation expt’l data expt’l data model inputs model inputs model outputs model outputs Use case 2: BIRNLex V1 V2

Aim 1: Investigate view-based approaches:Tasks 1.Catalog ad hoc application ontologies 2.Select query and view definition language (VDL) 3.Extend VDL 4.Query processing over a single view 5.Query processing over multiple views 6.Optimize for efficiency 7.Evaluate

Aim 2: Implement VQP: Tasks 1.Design system architecture 2.Source wrappers 3.VQP 4.Optimize for efficiency 5.Evaluate

Aim 3: VGEN: Tasks 1.Methods for visualizing and selecting subgraphs 2.Visual mapping methods 3.Methods for viewing the effect of mappings 4.VGEN 5.Optimize 6.Evaluate

Goals for this meeting Understand and agree on goals, use cases and tasks of the grant Get to know each other and our expertise Create the basis for smaller group collaborations

Agenda