Aggregation in Ontologies: Practical Implementations in OWL

摘要

Data modeling for Web Applications needs to be guided not only by the specific requirements of a particular application, but also by the goal of maximizing interoperability between systems. This necessitates the adoption of widely accepted design methods and a set of rich, theoretically motivated principles for organizing data in ontologies. This paper presents one set of such principles. It is based on the observation that current ontologies emphasize the abstraction mechanism of generalization but ignore the various forms of aggregation. We explore possible techniques for modeling aggregation with OWL, investigate the semantics of aggregation, and consider the merits of aggregation over generalization for modeling knowledge in particular situations.