Knowledge Bus: Generating Application-focused Databases from Large Ontologies.
Brian J. Peterson, William A. Andersen, J. Ronald Engel · 1998
As well as being useful for semantic integration of information systems, large shared ontologies may be applied as specifications for new systems. In this paper we discuss the design of Knowledge Bus, a system which generates information systems - databases and programming interfaces - from application-focused subsets of a large ontology (Cyc). The generated systems are semantically interoperable at the level of their shared representations. In addition, constraints and axioms contained in the ontological specification are encapsulated in the generated systems by an object-oriented (Java) API. This API makes the databases easily accessible to application programmers while preserving the intended semantics of the ontology. 1 Introduction The use of a shared vocabulary or ontology to enable semantic interoperability of existing databases and other software is gaining acceptance. Even greater benefits can be achieved by using the same ontologies as formal specifications for new systems....