Ontologias representam uma conceitualização compartilhada de uma comunidade de conhecimento. São construídas a partir da descrição dos significados dos conceitos, descritos através de seus atributos e dos relacionamentos entre os conceitos. Conceitos se referem ao objeto da conceitualização, o universo do discurso. São caracterizados por seus atributos e domínios de valores possíveis. Relacionamentos são utilizados para descreverem de que forma os conceitos se estruturam no mundo. Nas ontologias todos os conceitos são hierarquicamente definidos, porém existem outros relacionamentos que são definicionais, dando identidade aos conceitos e sentido ao mundo. Além dos relacionamentos de subsunção que constroem as taxonomias de conceitos, outras relações formais e materiais auxiliam na estruturação do domínio e na definição conceitual. As ferramentas de modelagem, no entanto, ainda são falhas em diferenciar os vários tipos de relacionamentos formais e materiais para atribuir as possibilidades de raciocínio automático. Em especial, relacionamentos mereológicos e partonômicos carecem de opções de implementação que permitam extrair o potencial semântico da modelagem. Este projeto de pesquisa tem como ponto de partida o estudo da literatura sobre ontologias e relações, em especial sobre relações formais e materiais, incluindo relações mereológicas e partonômicas, revisando os princípios encontrados nas ontologias. Além disso, nós identificamos os fundamentos teóricos das relações e analisamos a aplicação dos conceitos das relações sobre as principais ontologias de fundamentação em prática na atualidade. Na sequência, a partir das propostas levantadas, este trabalho propõe uma alternativa para a modelagem conceitual destas relações em uma ontologia de domínio visual. Esta alternativa foi disponibilizada na ferramenta de construção de ontologias do Projeto Obaitá, a qual está sendo desenvolvida pelo Grupo de Pesquisa de Bancos de Dados Inteligentes (BDI) da UFRGS. / Ontologies represent a shared conceptualization of a knowledge community. They are built from the description of the meaning of concepts, expressed through their attributes and their relationships. Concepts refer to the object of conceptualization, the universe of discourse. They are characterized by their attributes and domains of possible values. Relationships are used to describe how the concepts are structured in the world. In ontologies all concepts are hierarchically defined, however there are other relationships that are definitional, giving identity to the concepts and meaning to the world. In addition to the subsumption relationships that build the taxonomies of concepts, other formal and material relations assist in structuring the domain and the conceptual definition. The modeling tools, however, are still deficient in differentiating the various types of formal and material relationships in order to assign the possibilities of automated reasoning. In particular, mereological and partonomic relationships lack of implementation options that allow extracting the semantic potential when modeling. This research project takes as a starting point the study of the literature on ontologies and relations, especially on formal and material relations, including mereological and partonomic relations, reviewing the principles found on ontologies. Furthermore, we identify the theoretical foundations of the relations and analyze the application of the relations concepts to the main foundational ontologies in use nowadays. Following, from the raised proposals, this work proposes an alternative for the conceptual modeling of these relations in a visual domain ontology. This alternative has been made available on the ontology building tool of the Obaitá Project, which is under development by the Intelligent Databases Research Group (BDI) from UFRGS.

Made available in DSpace on 2015-04-11T14:02:35Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 andrea.pdf: 7259314 bytes, checksum: d0277f774ef42cd05833ff331802fdc5 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011-06-17 / Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) recognizes that biodiversity loss must be reduced to promote poverty alleviation and direct benefit of all live on Earth. To achieve that, we must consider robust strategies and action plans based on knowledge and state of art technology. In this context, we have two current scenarios, the Web as a dissemination environment and the Semantic Web to deal with the complexity of domains of high semantic expressiveness as biodiversity. The research is underway in universities and scientific organization aiming to develop Semantic Web as an additional resource associated to formal ontology and the avoidance of knowledge acquisition problems such as expertise dependence, tacit knowledge, experts availability and ideal time importance. Ontology can structure knowledge acquisition process for the purpose of comprehensive, portable machine understanding and knowledge extraction on the semantic web environment. These technologies applied to biodiversity domain can be a valuable resource for our region future strategy planning and its contribution for the planet. / A Convenção sobre Diversidade Biológica (Convention on Biological Diversity - CBD) reconhece que a perda da biodiversidade deve ser reduzida para promover a redução da pobreza e beneficiar diretamente todas as formas de vida na Terra. Para tanto, devem-se considerar estratégias robustas e planos de ação baseados em conhecimento e no estado da arte da tecnologia. Neste contexto, temos dois cenários atuais: a Web como ambiente de disseminação e a Web Semântica para tratar a complexidade de domínios com grande expressividade semântica, como o da biodiversidade. A pesquisa está em andamento em universidades e organizações científicas objetivando o desenvolvimento da Web Semântica como um recurso adicional associado à ontologia formal e à evasão de problemas na aquisição de conhecimento como a dependência do expertise, o conhecimento tácito, a disponibilidade dos peritos e a importância do tempo ideal. Ontologia estrutura o processo de aquisição de conhecimento para o propósito de compreensão, entendimento de máquinas portáteis e de extração de conhecimento do ambiente da Web Semântica. Estas tecnologias aplicadas ao domínio da biodiversidade são um recurso valioso para o planejamento estratégico do futuro da nossa região e sua contribuição para o planeta

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To achieve the dream of the semantic web, it must be possible for ordinary users to invoke services. It is clear that users need simple-to-invoke-and-use services. This dissertation offers an ontological approach to declaratively create services that users can invoke using free-form, natural-language-like specifications. Our approach uses task ontologies as foundational knowledge. A task ontology consists of a domain ontology and a process ontology. The domain ontology encodes domain information such as possible constraints and instances in terms of object sets, relationship sets among these object sets, and operations over values in object sets and relationship sets. The process ontology consists of generic processes that are domain independent-coded once and work for all. Our system recognizes the constraints in a service request, discovers any missing information and obtains it from users, and formalizes the constraints in the context of the domain ontology. The system satisfies the constraints by obtaining information from databases associated with the domain ontology and providing users with solutions or near solutions when there is no way to satisfy all the constraints. Our experiments with our prototype implementation show that our approach can create services that satisfy end-user needs.

In this thesis, a system, called Ontology-Driven Video Annotation and Retrieval System (OntoVARS) is developed in order to provide a video management system which is used for ontology-driven semantic content annotation and querying. The proposed system is based on MPEG-7 ontology which provides interoperability and common communication platform with other MPEG-7 ontology compatible systems. The Rhizomik MPEG-7 ontology is used as the core ontology and domain specific ontologies are integrated to the core ontology in order to provide ontology-based video content annotation and querying capabilities to the user. The proposed system supports content-based annotation and spatio-temporal data modeling in video databases by using the domain ontology concepts. Moreover, the system enables ontology-driven query formulation and processing according to the domain ontology instances and concepts. In the developed system, ontology-driven concept querying, spatio-temporal querying, region-based and time-based querying capabilities are performed as simple querying types. Besides these simple query types, compound queries are also generated by combining simple queries with &quot / (&quot / , &quot / )&quot / , &quot / AND&quot / and &quot / OR&quot / operators. For all these query types, the system supports both general and video specific query processing. By this means, the user is able to pose queries on all videos in the video databases as well as the details of a specific video of interest.

The aim of the research documented in the thesis was to design an ontology for the knowledge organization domain. Three requirements specifying areas of ontology use have been identified: making of statements for a knowledge base for knowledge organization, indexing of resources in the domain and interlinking with content-relevant ontologies. The design was elaborated by the method of reengineering the first version of ontology, created in the framework of the NAKI research project Knowledge base for subject area of knowledge organization in 2013-2015. The second version of ontology is based on the DOLCE foundational ontology, specifically on the reusing of its selected classes and predicates, including the axioms associated with them. The reengineering of the content of the first version of ontology was done by the domain and facet analysis methodology. The outcome is divided in two interlinked modules - axiomatized heavy- weight core ontology and light-weight terminological ontology. The ontology offers a solution to the compatibility of Czech and world terminology, it applies an extended concept of domain beyond the scope of memory institutions, and it presents a partial contribution to the development of the theory of knowledge organization. The content of the thesis is divided into five...

Submitted by Luciana Ferreira (lucgeral@gmail.com) on 2016-02-29T10:48:44Z No. of bitstreams: 2 Dissertação - Walquiria Fernandes Marins - 2015.pdf: 2611919 bytes, checksum: 3d20806ae28d0e0e4c891d8dd65cbd88 (MD5) license_rdf: 23148 bytes, checksum: 9da0b6dfac957114c6a7714714b86306 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Luciana Ferreira (lucgeral@gmail.com) on 2016-02-29T10:54:01Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 2 Dissertação - Walquiria Fernandes Marins - 2015.pdf: 2611919 bytes, checksum: 3d20806ae28d0e0e4c891d8dd65cbd88 (MD5) license_rdf: 23148 bytes, checksum: 9da0b6dfac957114c6a7714714b86306 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-02-29T10:54:01Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 Dissertação - Walquiria Fernandes Marins - 2015.pdf: 2611919 bytes, checksum: 3d20806ae28d0e0e4c891d8dd65cbd88 (MD5) license_rdf: 23148 bytes, checksum: 9da0b6dfac957114c6a7714714b86306 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-10-08 / There is an huge amount of data and information stored digitally. Part of this amount of data is available for consultation by Web, however, a significant portion is hidden, due to its storage form, and can’t be recovered by traditional search engines. This makes users face a common and growing challenge to search and find specific information. This challenge is enhanced by the unpreparedness of users to formulate searches and the limitations inherent in research technologies, that because of syntactic differences, can’t find probably relevant data. Aiming to expand the possibilities of semantic interpretation of a query, this work proposes an approach to interpretation of queries in natural language to relational databases through the use of domain ontologies as a tool for their interpretation and semantic enrichment. With the implementation of the approach and its appreciation against a backdrop of queries without the semantic enrichment it is observed that the approach contributes satisfactorily to identify the user’s intention. / Há uma quantidade enorme de dados e informações armazenadas digitalmente. Uma parte desse volume de dados está disponível para consultas através da Web, entretanto, uma parcela significativa está oculta, devido à sua forma de armazenamento, e não pode ser recuperada pelos mecanismos tradicionais de busca. Isso faz com que os usuários enfrentem um desafio comum e crescente para buscar e encontrar informações específicas. Este desafio é potencializado pelo despreparo dos usuários em formular buscas e pelas limitações inerentes às tecnologias de pesquisa que, em virtude de diferenças sintáticas, não conseguem encontrar dados provavelmente relevantes. Visando ampliar as possibilidades de interpretação semântica de uma consulta, este trabalho propõe uma abordagem de interpretação de consultas em linguagem natural a bancos de dados relacionais através do uso de ontologias de domínio como instrumento para sua interpretação e enriquecimento semântico. Com a implementação da abordagem e sua apreciação em relação a um cená- rio de consultas sem o enriquecimento semântico observa-se que a abordagem contribui satisfatoriamente para identificar a intenção do usuário.

The dissertation focuses on library automation. It examines relationships between the field of library automation and library management systems and the needs of libraries in relation to the process of library software selection. The main goal of the dissertation has been to create a library automation domain ontology and to develop tools to support a decision-making process of library software selection. The domain ontology has been created; it describes the field of library automation in relation to library systems, which are set in the broader context of the field of library automation and are regarded in terms of needs of libraries in connection to library software change. To obtain terms for ontology entity names both quantitative and mixed research methods were used, namely the analysis of scholarly texts on library automation and library systems; text analyses were performed using Voyant Tools software. Object properties and relationships among entities in ontology are based on the results of a qualitative survey of the needs of libraries in relation to the library management software. Based on the domain ontology, flowcharts have been created that illustrate the library's decision-making process when selecting a library management system. During the work on the dissertation, a methodological...