Ontology Extraction Using Views for Semantic Web

Abstract

The emergence of Semantic Web (SW) and the related technologies promise to make the Web a meaningful experience. Conversely, success of SW and its applications depends largely on utilization and interoperability of well-formulated ontology bases in an automated heterogeneous environment. This creates a need to investigate utilization of an (materialized) ontology view as an alternative version of an ontology. However, high level modeling, design and querying techniques still proves to be a challenging task for SW paradigm, as, unlike classical database systems, ontology view definitions and querying have to be done at high-level abstraction. In order to address such an issue, in this chapter, we describe an abstract view formalism forSW (SW-view) with conceptual and logical extensions. SW-views provides the needed conceptual and logical semantics to engineer ontology bases using three levels of abstraction, namely (1) conceptual, (2) logical/schema and (3) instance levels. We first provide the view model and it formal properties including a set of conceptual operators, which enable us to do ontology extraction at the conceptual level. Later, we provide a schemata transformation methodology to materialize SW-views under the Ontology Extraction Methodology (OEM) framework.