Concept abduction for semantic matchmaking in distributed and modular ontologies

Abstract

Recently, attempts have been done to formalize Semantic Matchmaking, the process of finding potential matches between demands and supplies based on their logical relations with reference to a common ontology, in Description Logics (DLs). We extend the formalization to Packages-based Description Logics (P-DLs), modular extensions of DLs, in order to perform the matchmaking operation in contexts where descriptions of demands and supplies are specified in different terminologies.

Keywords

• semantic matchmaking
• package-based description logics
• distributed ontology
• abductive reasoning
• tableaux-based methods

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Introduction

Concept Abduction is a novel non-monotonic inference task proposed for description logics to evaluate potential matches between demands and supplies. Given two concepts C, D and a TBox T such that C u D 6vT ⊥, this reasoning service allows to find a concept H (hypothesis) such that C u H 6vT ⊥ and C u H vT D .

Extending Concept Abduction to the distributed context of P-DLs, in place of a single TBox T , we have a set of packages Σ = {Pi}. Let Pw ∈ Σ be some witness package, the computing of H now need to be done with respect to Pw . To do that, we devise a distributed algorithm which is based on the federated reasoning technique developed for P-DLs[ 2 ] and the uniform tableauxbased method[ 3 ]. The procedure consists of two stages: We have developed a distributed tableaux-based algorithm for solving the concept abduction problem in the distributed and modular context of Package-based Description Logics. This allows to perform the Semantic Matchmaking in situations where demands and supplies are specified with reference to different ontologies. In the future, we would like to optimize this method to achieve better performance. 1 ’vw’ is used to denote that the inference is performed from the local point of view of Pw.

References

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2. Jie Bao , Doina Caragea, and Vasant Honavar . A tableau-based federated reasoning algorithm for modular ontologies . In In IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence , pages 404 - 410 . IEEE Press, 2006 .

3. S. Colucci , T. Di Noia , E. Di Sciascio , F. M. Donini , and M. Mongiello . A uniform tableaux-based approach to concept abduction and contraction in aln . In Contraction in ALN . In Proc. of DL-04 ( 2004 ), CEUR Workshop Proceedings, page 104 , 2004 .

4. Tommaso Di Noia , Eugenio Di Sciascio, and Francesco M. Donini . Semantic matchmaking as non-monotonic reasoning: A description logic approach . Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research , 29 : 307 , 2007 .