How to Integrate Ontologies and Rules?

It is a challenge1 in a business to enable the right people to interact in their own way with the right part of their business application. Business executives, business analysts, and IT developers all interact in different ways with the aspects of a business application, to use, control, maintain and/or evolve it.

We believe that this can be achieved by cleanly separating the domain ontology from the actual business rules, on the one hand; and the representation of the knowledge from its operationalisation in IT applications, on the other hand.

The vocabulary and terminology that is required to express the business rules, and the underlying conceptual structure, must be acquired from the sources that define the business and the policies, including business policy documents; the rules must be authored by the owner of the business policies that they aim to implement, using that vocabulary (and, thus, grounded in that conceptual structure); the data models for the IT applications must be designed by IT developers based on the application requirements.

As such, one can distinguish three views on the business organization:

1. the view of the business analyst via business policies and rules
2. the view of the knowledge engineer via ontologies and rules
3. and the view of the IT department via an operationalization in applications

One can glue those three views together by considering the acquisition of ontologies and rules from natural language documents such as business policies and rules, their separate management and maintenance, and their transparent operationalization in IT applications.

In the 4-hour technical tutorial we give an overview of the above three steps and focus on the management of combinations of ontologies and rules. In doing so, we touch upon topics such as Natural Language Processing (NLP), ontology languages such as OWL 2, and logical and production rules, with attention for the integration of ontologies and rules and its arising issues.

Venue

Tutorial co-located with the Twenty-Fourth Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-10), July 12th AM, 2010, in Atlanta (USA).

Presenters

• Thomas Eiter (TU Vienna)
• Stijn Heymans (TU Vienna)
• Luis Polo (Fundación CTIC)
• Adeline Nazarenko (Université Paris 13)

Attachments:

ontorule-aaai10-tutorial-handout..pdf

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