Ontologies for building template knowledge models

Paper Presenter: Baby Ashwin Gobin, University of Mauritius

Author(s):
Baby Ashwin Gobin, University of Mauritius
R.K Subramananian, University of Mauritius
Models are used to capture the essential features of a real system by
breaking them down into smaller components so that they can be better
understood and are considered a simplification of reality (Booch et al.
1999). They are used in system development to draw blueprints of the
system and facilitate communication between different people (Abdullah
et al. 2002). Models are important for understanding the working
mechanisms within a Knowledge Based System (KBS) such as: the tasks,
methods, how knowledge is inferred, the domain knowledge and its
schemas (Weilinga et al. 1997).Therefore knowledge modelling is
considered to be a key component for the development of KBS. The
knowledge models contain knowledge about the domain of application and
the reasoning components that need to be implemented.
CommonKADS (Schreiber et al. 2000) is one of the most mature second
generation knowledge engineering methodologies. KBS development is
based on the construction of a number of separate models that capture
the desired features of the system and its environment. The methodology
consists of a selection and refinement of available model templates. The
knowledge model specifies the knowledge and the reasoning requirements
of the system. In CommonKADS the knowledge model has three parts:
domain knowledge, task knowledge and inference knowledge. The domain
knowledge specifies specific knowledge to the domain of application and
the information types that are needed in the application. It describes the
domain schema and the knowledge base. The inference knowledge
describes how domain knowledge can be used to carry out reasoning
process. The main ingredients of inference knowledge are inferences,
knowledge roles and transfer functions. The task knowledge describes the
goals that need to be achieved by the system and the strategies that will
be used to achieve them. The two main components are the task and the
task method.
CommonKADS also supports the partial reuse of knowledge models to
support the knowledge modeling process. As compared to software
engineering, knowledge intensive task are limited and can be categorised.
Knowledge engineer can use these templates to build a system with
respect to the task that need to be accomplished instead of starting
everything from scratch. The advantages of reuse are as follows:
It prevents from "re-inventing the wheel"
It is cost/time efficient
It decreases complexity
It provides for quality-assurance

Hence a catalogue of task templates is provided for the above tasks. The
task templates consist of the task definition and the task methods. They
are reusable combination of model elements that have 1) (provisional)
inference structure, 2) typical control structure and 3) typical domain
schema. The task template is also specific for a task type and supports
top-down knowledge modeling.
In the work we discuss in details how we have developed an ontology
consisting of the template knowledge model defined in CommonKADS. We
have used OWL as the language used to develop the ontology. Semantic
Web Languages also provides for different possibilities for knowledge
representation. We propose the use of Semantic Web Languages as an
alternative language to be used for building the knowledge model. OWL
(Web Ontology Language) is a language for defining Web ontologies. OWL
is based on description logic SHIQ. OWL builds on RDF and RDF Schema,
and uses RDF's XML syntax. So the root element of a OWL ontology is an
rdf:RDF element which also species a number of namespaces. We have
used the Protg OWL ontology editor and knowledge aquisiton tool
(Horridge et al. 2004) to create the ontology.
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