Towards a Core Ontology for Information Integration

^{Martin Doerr, Jane Hunter* and Carl Lagoze**}
Institute of Computer Science, Foundation for Research and Technology, Heraklion, Greece
Email: martin@ics.forth.gr
*DSTC Pty, Ltd., Brisbane, Australia
Email: jane@dstc.edu.au
**Computing and Information Science, Cornell University, Ithaca NY
Email: lagoze@cs.cornell.edu
Key features References; Figures 1-4

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1 Introduction: Information Integration
2 Motivation: An architecture for information integration
3 Context: Concept spaces from two communities

CIDOC/CRM
ABC Ontology

4 Process: Building an agreement across the concept spaces
5 Results: A merged ontology for information integration

About Situations and Events
About Activities and Actions
About Concreteness of the Immaterial
About Manifestations

6 Conclusions
Acknowledgements
References

Abstract

In this paper, we argue that a core ontology is one of the key building blocks necessary to enable the scalable assimilation of information from diverse sources. A complete and extensible ontology that expresses the basic concepts that are common across a variety of domains and can provide the basis for specialization into domain-specific concepts and vocabularies, is essential for well-defined mappings between domain-specific knowledge representations (i.e. metadata vocabularies) and the subsequent building of a variety of services such as cross-domain searching, browsing, data mining and knowledge extraction. This paper describes the results of a series of three workshops held in 2001 and 2002 which brought together representatives from the cultural heritage and digital library communities with the goal of harmonizing their knowledge perspectives and producing a core ontology. The knowledge perspectives of these two communities were represented by the CIDOC/CRM [31], an ontology for information exchange in the cultural heritage and museum community, and the ABC ontology [33], a model for the exchange and integration of digital library information. This paper describes the mediation process between these two different knowledge biases and the results of this mediation - the harmonization of the ABC and CIDOC/CRM ontologies, which we believe may provide a useful basis for information integration in the wider scope of the involved communities.

Index of Figures

Figure 1. Part of the CIDOC CRM IsA hierarchy of classes
Figure 2. Complete ABC IsA hierarchy of classes
Figure 3. Merged ABC and CIDOC CRM class hierarchies
Figure 4. Relationships between ABC and CIDOC CRM property hierarchies

Acknowledgements

Support for the harmonization meetings described in this paper came from the DELOS Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries an initiative funded by the European Commission's Information Society Technologies 5th Framework Programme (IST-FP5). Work on the CIDOC CRM is supported by The Research Libraries Group, ICS-FORTH and the European Union. Work on the ABC ontology is supported by NSF Grant 9905955, JISC Grant 9906 and the Cooperative Research Centre for Enterprise Distributed Systems Technology (DSTC) through the Australian Federal Government’s CRC Programme. The authors also wish to thank the other participants in the harmonization workshops for their valuable contributions to this effort: Thomas Baker, Dan Brickley, Donatella Castelli, James Cheney, Nicholas Crofts, Aldo Gangemi, Tony Gill, Nicola Guarino, Stephan Koernig, Carlo Meghini, Wolfgang Meier, Libby Miller and Nikolay A.Skvortsov.

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Towards a Core Ontology for Information Integration

Contents

Abstract

Index of Figures

Acknowledgements

References