Questions for ONT2 course: “Ontology Based Support to Enterprise Introperability”
Activity B6 - Training
© 2005-2006 The ATHENA Consortium.
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Questions for ONT2 course: “Ontology Based Support to Enterprise Introperability”
© 2005-2006 The ATHENA Consortium.
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Questions for ONT2 course: “Ontology Based Support to Enterprise Introperability”
Module 1 - What is Interoperability and Semantic Based
Interoperability?
Semantic Based Interoperability
What is the main target of Interoperability Concepts and Solutions?
To enhance Enterprise visibility
To support collaboration among enterprises at all levels of the enterprise
To support design and development of enterprise applications
When does Interoperability (or lack of) occur?
At the boundaries of applications and services.
At the boundaries of inter-Enterprise Collaborations
At the level of workgroup collaborations
Enterprise Model Example
In the figure below what is the claim of Semantic Interoperability (ATHENA
Implementation)?
Cost
2)
O(n
1000
EAI solution
100
Athena
10
10
© 2005-2006 The ATHENA Consortium.
10 Peers
0
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Questions for ONT2 course: “Ontology Based Support to Enterprise Introperability”
Module 2 – What are the observed requirements for
semantic based interoperability solutions?
Semantic Interoperability Scope
What is semantic interoperability target? What is the level of flexibility it allows?
the main goal of semantic interoperability is to allow the seamless cooperation between
software applications that were not initially developed for this purpose. The cooperation
should be possible without requiring modifications or adaptations of the existing
applications and maintaining each single data representation.
What are possible target areas from the list below?
Semantic Searching and Retrieval
X
Application Integration
Business Message Reconciliation
What are possible services that semantics support from the list below?
Semantic queries
Requirements evaluation and mapping
Transformation and mapping
© 2005-2006 The ATHENA Consortium.
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Questions for ONT2 course: “Ontology Based Support to Enterprise Introperability”
Ontology Management System Requirements
Is there a need to have a formal knowledge representation language? In what
terms?
In order to support reasoning ontologies and related technologies are required
An ontology is used to give meaning to the processes, the (web)services and to the
information structures that an application wishes to exchange with other applications.
The purpose of the ontology modelling is to describe in not ambiguous way the shared
understanding of a domain problem.
Annotations
What is the scope of Semantic annotations?
Annotations can be defined for (process/document/service) models
expressed using XSD, RDFS and XMI light
The annotation is directed to human and computer user
Terms used in the annotation must be contained in the domain Ontology
Concerning the positioning the annotation must be attached to the
document: in this way the resource is not modified.
Scope and Role of the Semantic Annotation Tools?
The Annotation tool should be a web-application, accessible from
everywhere though a web browser
© 2005-2006 The ATHENA Consortium.
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Questions for ONT2 course: “Ontology Based Support to Enterprise Introperability”
Module 3 – State of the Art of Semantic Based
Interoperability
Ontology Representation and Tools
In terms of requirements for Athena, there are three major features that
are needed in an ontology modelling language:
- formal basis, and availability of inference engines capable of
reasoning over ontology content;
- business-oriented constructs, to facilitate the construction of business
ontologies (business domain specificity)
- expressive power, sufficient to model some characteristics related to
process ontologies (e.g., precedence relation, conditionals to represent
pre- and post-conditions).
For this reason, to fill this gap, Athena proposes OPAL (Object, Process,
Actor modelling Language).
Reasoning tools
What tools were evaluated and among others further considered for use and extension?
Jess
Racer
Metalog
Jena2
Reasons and background for selection of Jena2
Jena2 has been selected because:
- It offers all the benefits of Java
- It is a complete suite of tools, offering primitives for managing
RDF/OWL, performing advanced RDQL queries.
- Rules can be extended with (also complex) methods
- Rules can be used to “rewrite”
© 2005-2006 The ATHENA Consortium.
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Questions for ONT2 course: “Ontology Based Support to Enterprise Introperability”
Module 4 – ATHENA Semantic Based Interoperability
Solutions
ATHENA Suite Architecture
Revise the architectural figure and describe its components and functional design
Annotations methodology and expressiveness
The idea is to start from the simplest possible annotations (where the annotated concept is
associate to one/several ontology concepts) to the most formal and complex one (where a
concept is annotated by a formal OWL expression)
Full Semantic Annotation.
Simple Semantic Annotation.
Path Semantic Annotation.
Terminological Semantic Annotation.
© 2005-2006 The ATHENA Consortium.
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Questions for ONT2 course: “Ontology Based Support to Enterprise Introperability”
Reconciliation
Describe in what way the ATHENA suite supports the user in defining reconciliation
rules
Describe the mutual relationship between annotations and reconciliation rules
They are defined separately, in theory mutually independent. Their sequential and
concurrent design is preferable.
© 2005-2006 The ATHENA Consortium.
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