Model-driven interaction with ontologies

Ontologies are used in bio-health, e-science, and Semantic Web applications to capture the meaning of terms. Designing ontologies is a non-trivial task that requires sophisticated tool support. Ontology languages are based on (Description) Logics, and thus this tool support can and must take into account the underlying semantics of an ontology. This semantics is defined in terms of models, i.e., interpretations that satisfy the axioms in an ontology. Standard ontology editors interact with users on an ’axiom’ level and not via models. For certain engineering tasks, for example to check what the ontology says about a class, say ’rabbit’, it seems promising to make use of these models, i.e., to provide suitable descriptions of instances of ’rabbit’. The aim of this PhD project is to explore how we can use models to interact with ontology engineers.

We have investigated this idea in our Supermodel project, and it seems to be promising yet of interesting complexity due to the number and size of models available, and due to the fact that, in general, an ontology doesn’t describe how a ’typical rabbit’ would like.

Requirements: knowledge of (or willingness to learn about) first order and description logic, logic-based knowledge representation, ontologies; standard software development skills.