Contextual Ontology Modeling Language to Facilitate the use of enabling Semantic Web Technologies

Abstract

A common approach to represent semantics on Semantic Web area is to use an ontology. However, there is an emerging approach that combines an ontology with its context definition. So, the misunderstanding can be avoided if the context is explicitly defined. The resulting structure is called contextual ontology. To process a contextual ontology at run time, it has to be expressed in a machine processable language. However, for the analysis and design phase of a Web domain, a more appropriate ontology modeling language is needed. To this aim, this chapter presents a metamodel for modeling explicit and formal contextual ontologies that assists Web domain designers in modeling contextual ontologies. Furthermore, the relationship between XML specifications and ontologies in order to add formal and explicit semantics to Web domain designs is analyzed.