AIC Seminar Series

Description Logic-based ontologies play a key role in the Semantic Web. They can be used to describe the intended meaning of Web resources and can exploit powerful Description Logic (DL) reasoning tools, so as to facilitate machine understandability of Web resources. I will present a use case in Bioinformatics to illustrate how to apply DL reasoning. Although the Semantic Web standard ontology language OWL is rather expressive, it has a very serious limitation on datatypes; i.e., it does not support customised datatypes. It has been pointed out that many potential users will be able to adopt OWL unless this limitation is overcome. Accordingly, the Semantic Web Best Practices and Development Working Group sets up a task force to address this issue. After identifying some key requirements of a datatype extension of OWL (DL), I will present two novel extensions of OWL (DL) and how they satisfy the identified requirements. The approach here can be generalised to a wide range of decidable DL-based ontology languages that provide customised datatypes and datatype predicates. I will conclude this talk by briefly mentioning some other extensions of OWL, such as rules, fuzziness and metamodeling etc.

Dr. Jeff Z. Pan is a Lecturer in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Aberdeen. Jeff's main research interests lie in knowledge representation, ontologies and the Web. His work has focused on the design of logics and ontology languages, automated reasoning, in particular the development of reasoning techniques for the logics underpinning ontology languages, and the applications of all the above (such as the Semantic Web). During 2000-2003, he was working on his Ph.D. project in the School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester with Prof. Ian Horrocks, who has recently been awarded the 2005 Roger Needham Award from the British Computer Society and Senior Research Fellowship by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). Jeff's Ph.D. research topic was "Description Logics: Reasoning Support for the Semantic Web". Before coming to Aberdeen, Jeff was a PostDoc researcher in the School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester, coordinating the "Semantic Web Language Extension" work package in the Knowledge Web project. He is a co-author of RDFS(FA) and an invited reviewer of the Semantic and Abstract Syntax of the OWL Web ontology language. He is a co-coordinator of both the Software Engineering and the Multimedia Task Forces in the W3C Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment Working Group. His proposal on adding customised datatypes into OWL (DL) has been published in a W3C note, which addresses how to use XML Schema datatypes in RDF and OWL. He is a member of the RuleML steering committee, and he is co-chairing the Fuzzy RuleML Technical Group.

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