THE APPLICATION OF A HIERARCHICAL TREE METHOD TO ONTOLOGY KNOWLEDGE ENGINEERING

Abstract

Ontology technologies have been widely studied for their capabilities of semantic description and knowledge inference in a variety of application domains. The main obstacle for the advancement of ontologies is the immature building methods and construction principles. It is challenging to discover how to tune a large complete ontology to small applications and build domain ontologies pragmatically. This paper proposes a hierarchical tree method that provides guidelines to the building of a hierarchical geo-ontology and corresponding construction rules for different levels of ontologies. This hierarchical ontology construction method can be used to realize lower-level ontology building based on the restrictions of the upper-level ontology. It can also connect different levels of ontologies into a hierarchical structure. Based on the resulting hierarchical tree structure, the management and usage of ontologies becomes feasible and more efficient. Furthermore, to better elaborate the hierarchical relationships among the concepts surrounding the basic tree structure, this paper introduces Class Meta-Information (CMI) to OWL (Ontology Web Language) and uses Hierarchical Identification (HID) to draw conclusion on concepts' hierarchical relations. Examples, experimental simulation and comparative analyses are given to explain further the applications of this hierarchical tree method in the areas of ontology engineering.