Introduction to the special issue on advances in ontologies

This special issue of the Expert Systems journal addresses research issues on ontology, an area that is receiving increased attention from researchers on the semantic web. According to Gruber (1993), an ontology is an explicit specification of a conceptualization, i.e. an abstract, simplified view of the world that includes the objects, concepts and the relationships between them in a domain of interest. The use of formal ontologies in knowledge systems has many advantages. It allows an unambiguous specification of the structure of knowledge in a domain, enables knowledge sharing and reuse and, consequently, makes automated reasoning about ontologies possible. In recent years, there has been a worldwide increase in the use of ontologies, both in industry and in research laboratories. This special issue presents the recent advances, both in theory and practical applications, of ontologies to a general audience and provides an opportunity for the broader expert systems community to become aware of current ontology research. There was an overwhelming interest in the general call for papers for the special issue. We received 24 high quality submissions from researchers in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, France, Iran, Japan, Spain, Taiwan, Republic of China, Turkey and the USA. Each submission was sent to at least two reviewers who are experts in ontology research and closely related areas. Although we judged many more submissions to be publishable, we could only include eight papers in the special issue due to time and space limitations. A few high quality papers that we could not accommodate in the special issue were referred to regular issues of Expert Systems. The submissions also included the revised and extended versions of a number of papers selected from among those presented at the Australasian Ontology Workshop (AOW 2006) (Orgun & Meyer, 2006). AOW 2006 was held on 5 December 2006 in conjunction with the 19th Australian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia. The purpose of the AOW workshop series is to bring together ontology researchers from academia and industry in the Australasian region for interaction, discussion, sharing of results and initiation of new projects, and also to raise the awareness of the Australasian artificial intelligence community to state-of-the-art ontology research conducted in the region. This special issue is further testament to the vibrant ontology research conducted within the Australasian region, and its strong connections with the international ontology community. We trust that the breadth and diversity of the papers published in this special issue will foster further research on ontologies ranging from theoretical to practical issues and to applications. The special issue starts off with papers on interoperability in ontologies and ontology merging, alignment and integration. Semantic interoperability between ontologies is essential for enabling communication and sharing of information between heterogeneous systems. The paper by Orgun et al. surveys the main approaches for semantic interoperability between domain ontologies. The authors critically examine various approaches based on the underlying technology used, i.e. agent- or non-agent-based, the degree of automation and the use of intermediaries such as lexicons and meta-ontologies. Their conclusion is that if ontologies for the semantic web are to realize their full potential, it is important to work towards full automation of the semantic translation between ontologies. The paper by Li and Yang discusses a novel agent-based approach for ontology mapping and integration. Their main aim is to identify the main tasks of ontology mapping and integration and assign them to different agents, with the purpose of providing a runtime environment for dynamic ontology management. This work leverages agent technology, and it is a step towards the full automation envisioned in the paper by Orgun et al. The paper by Qazvinian et al. proposes an evolutionary approach based on genetic algorithms to extract an optimal mapping in ontology matching. The main idea here is to transform the ontology alignment problem into an optimization problem based on maximizing the overall similarity between entities among two ontologies. The paper by Hooijmaijers and Stumptner addresses how ontology integration can be enhanced by considering author information, trust and credibility. It is observed that, by annotating ontologies with author information and trust ratings, the user is provided with extra flexibility when making decisions based on queries to an integrated ontology. Trust is a key concept in agent-based systems operating in dynamic environments such as the semantic web (Golbeck et al., 2003) and it should not come as a surprise that it should also play an important role in ontology integration. The next two papers further explore the design and implementation of content languages for the semantic web (Berners-Lee et al., 2001). Effective communication between agents operating on behalf of humans is essential to realize the ultimate goal of the semantic web. The paper by Schwitter and Tilbrook proposes a novel approach to support the creation of meaningful web annotations in a controlled natural language. The authors advance the thesis that, rather than using a formal language, a well-defined controlled natural language enables human annotators to summarize the contents of a website better. Annotations are then transformed into a machine-processable form based on predicate logic and checked for consistency and informativeness for question-answering. The paper by Erdur and Seylan starts with the well-known OWL Web Ontology Language (Smith et al., 2004) and bases their content language for agent communication on a hybrid description logic which allows for the representation and reasoning about beliefs and intentions of agents. As a result, it is shown that agents can conform to the semantics of agent communication that is explained in terms of the mental states of the participants. The last two papers address different topics. The paper by Lefort, Taylor and Ratcliffe provides an empirical study of description logic reasoners in building and maintaining large part–whole ontologies such as those used in supply-chain management or reliability assessment in the aerospace industry. The study starts with the transformation of large-scale part–whole hierarchies into ontologies based on two best practice ontology engineering patterns, and then feeds them to a number of description logic reasoners for performance benchmarking. The empirical study shows that a particular ontology engineering pattern (the use of right-identity axioms supported by the EL+description logic) results in better reasoner performance. The paper by Valencia-García et al. addresses the difficult task of learning ontologies from natural language documents. The presented semi-automatic methodology is driven by knowledge engineering techniques such as incremental knowledge acquisition from domain experts and natural language techniques such as part-of-speech tagging. It supports multiple semantic relationships between concepts in an ontology and is able to detect inconsistencies in the resulting ontologies. Many individuals contributed to this special issue. First, we would like to thank the Editor-in-Chief of Expert Systems, Lucia Rapanotti, for her enthusiasm and continuing support for the special issue. Second, we are also indebted to the authors of the 24 submissions who responded to the call for papers in early 2007. This special issue would not have been possible without their submissions. Last but not the least, we would like express our appreciation to our reviewers; they generously donated their time and expertise in reading the submissions and providing very detailed and constructive comments for the authors; we would like to thank them all: Mike Bain (University of New South Wales, Australia) Richard Booth (Mahasarakham University, Thailand) Werner Ceusters (SUNY Buffalo, USA) Samir Chopra (CUNY Brooklyn, USA) Bob Colomb (University of Queensland, Australia) Stephen Cranefield (University of Otago, New Zealand) Anne Cregan (NICTA and University of New South Wales, Australia) Peter Eklund (University of Wollongong, Australia) Atilla Elçi (Eastern Mediterranean University, Turkey) Giorgos Flouris (FORTH, Greece) Vadim Gerasimov (CSIRO, Australia) Aurona Gerber (Meraka Institute, South Africa) Manolis Gergatsoulis (Ionian University, Greece) Aditya Ghose (University of Wollongong, Australia) Guido Governatori (University of Queensland, Australia) Warwick Graco (Australian Taxation Office, Australia) Fikret Gürgen (Boḡaziçi University, Turkey) Dennis Hooijmaijers (University of South Australia, Australia) Bo Hu (University of Southampton, UK) Laurent Lefort (CSIRO, Australia) Costas Mantratzis (University of Westminster, UK) Philippe Martin (Griffith University, Australia) Lars Mönch (University of Hagen, Germany) Abhaya Nayak (Macquarie University, Australia) Bhavna Orgun (Macquarie University, Australia) Maurice Pagnucco (University of New South Wales, Australia) Jeff Pan (University of Aberdeen, UK) Laurent Perrussel (IRIT – Université Toulouse, France) Anet Potgieter (University of Cape Town, South Africa) Quentin Reul (University of Aberdeen, UK) Debbie Richards (Macquarie University, Australia) Jennifer Sampson (NICTA, Australia) Rolf Schwitter (Macquarie University, Australia) Steven Shapiro (University of Leipzig, Germany) Kerry Taylor (CSIRO, Australia) Jean-Marc Thevenin (IRIT – Université Toulouse, France) Olga de Troyer (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium) Chao Wang (Universiy of Technology, Sydney, Australia) Wayne Wobcke (University of New South Wales, Australia) Pιnar Yolum (Boḡaziçi University, Turkey) Minjie Zhang (University of Wollongong, Australia) Mehmet A. Orgun Mehmet A. Orgun is an associate professor at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. He received his BSc and MSc degrees in computer science and engineering from Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey, and his PhD degree in computer science from the University of Victoria, Canada, in 1991. Prior to joining Macquarie University as a lecturer in September 1992, he worked as a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Victoria in the Rigi project on software reverse engineering. His current research interests include intelligent agents, temporal reasoning, knowledge discovery and reactive and distributed systems. He is co-founder of the Intelligent Systems Group at Macquarie University. He has authored and co-authored more than 120 peer-reviewed technical papers. He has received funding for his research programme from the Australian Research Council and Macquarie University. He serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Universal Computer Science and the Open Cybernetics and Systemics Journal. He recently served as the workshop co-chair of the Second Australasian Ontology Workshop (AOW 2006) and the 2nd IEEE International Workshop on Engineering Semantic Agent Systems (ESAS 2007). He was the Program Committee co-chair of the 20th Australian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AI'07). He is also serving as the workshop co-chair of the 32nd Annual IEEE International Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC 2008). He is a senior member of the IEEE. Thomas Meyer Thomas Meyer is a principal researcher and research group leader of the Knowledge Systems Group at the Meraka Institute, Pretoria, South Africa. He was a senior researcher in the Knowledge Representation and Reasoning program at NICTA, Sydney, Australia, from 2003 to 2007. During that time he also had a conjoint appointment as associate professor in the School of Computer Science at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. Prior to that he held positions as associate professor in computer science at the University of Pretoria, senior lecturer in computer science at the University of South Africa, Pretoria, and postdoctoral research fellow in information systems at the University of Wollongong, Australia. He obtained a PhD in computer science from the University of South Africa in 1999. He is interested in the reasoning capabilities of agents, both human and artificial. His current research interests include reasoning about ontologies using description logics, non-standard inference, dealing with preferences, and constraints. Thomas has authored and co-authored more than 90 technical papers in peer-reviewed conferences and workshops. He is on the programme committee of numerous conferences and workshops, including the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence. He is co-chair of the Australasian Ontology Workshop series, and publicity chair for KR 2008: Eleventh International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning.

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