Ontologies

One of VIStology's core capabilities is the design and development of formal ontologies in RDF, DAML, OWL and SWRL. The ontologies we develop are primarily for use in the areas of situation awareness and data fusion. Some of these ontologies are published for use by the Data Fusion and Semantic Web user communities.

JC3IEM OWL Ontology

The Joint Command, Control and Communication Information Exchange Data Model (JC3IEDM) is being developed by the NATO-sponsored Multilateral Interoperability Programme (MIP) for the purpose of facilitating the exchange of command, control and communication information among coalition forces. VIStology has developed a set of transformations to automatically translate the evolving JC3IEDM ERWIN specification into an OWL ontology comprising over 7900 elements (OWL classes, properties and their instances). The JC3IEDM OWL ontology along with a readme file are available here: JC3IEDM3.1a. For more information on the methodology behind the translation of JC3IEDM into OWL, please download our 2007 ICCRTS article or send inquiries to jc3iedm@vistology.com.

Symptom Ontology

The VIStology symptom ontology is used by ConsVISor to create OWL descriptions of the symptoms of problems it discovers as it checks the consistency of OWL documents. Each identified symptom is related to one or more OWL axioms, most of which are defined in the W3C OWL Language Semantics and Abstract Syntax document. The relationship between symptoms and axioms is described in this table and brief descriptions of each symptom class is available here. The graphical structure of the symptom ontology can be seen in this UML diagram. An alternative view into the symptom ontology (without the class hierarchy) can be seen in this image produced by the GraphViz dotty application from a dot file generated by an XSLT script used for verification purposes.

We, VIStology, Inc., believe there is value in developing a common symptom ontology for use by all programs that deal with identifying errors in OWL documents. We offer the VIStology symptom ontology as a starting point for the development of a common symptom ontology. If you are interested in participating in its development or have comments on the current symptom ontology please send them to symptom@vistology.com.

Situation Awareness Core Ontology

As part of our on going research into systems that support situation assessment and awareness, VIStology has developed a core situation awareness (SAW) ontology and is making it available for use by all interested parties. Its key constituents include classes for objects, attributes, relations, goals and events along with the fundamental properties relating them to one another. The intent of this effort is to provide a common ontology that can be extended as required to meet the needs of specific domains. For example, in the domain of supply logistics the class of physical objects would be sub-classed to define classes of suppliers, consumers, resources, vehicles, etc. Having a common core ontology enables the development of generic reasoning systems that can be applied to a variety of new situations merely through the development of domain specific ontologies grounded in the SAW Core ontology. This core ontology is serving as the basis for SAWA, VIStology's Situation Awareness Assistant being developed under an SBIR grant from AFRL. For more information see the relevant articles listed under Publications.

VIStology Test Cases for OWL

ConsVISor is a consistency checking tool for RDF, OWL Full, OWL DL and OWL Lite ontologies and annotations. The output of ConsVISor consists of symptoms that may be indicative of problems present in RDF/OWL documents. Symptoms can range from innocuous warnings to severe errors. To ensure that ConsVISor operates correctly, a collection of test cases was developed that illustrate some of the most commonly occurring flaws in ontologies and annotations. The emphasis was on realistic ontologies and flaws, based on many years of experience. The test cases developed by VIStology have a very different character from those developed by the World Wide Web Consortium for testing consistency checking tools. The W3C test cases have been acknowledged by their authors to be more concerned with testing the limits of consistency checking tools rather than representative of realistic cases.