Dimensional Ontology And Its Application

With th'e development of Semantic Web and the improvement of Ontology technology, Semantic Web and Ontology have broad applications in such domains as knowledge management, knowledge engineering, information extraction and retrieval. Especially in knowledge management, Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Web Ontology Language (OWL) proposed by W3C, are very suitable to resolve the problems of knowledge organization, knowledge retrieval and knowledge reasoning in the domains of life science, health science, geographic information system, e-government and so on.During the application of Semantic Web and Ontology in different domains, the problem of context-sensitive knowledge management has been standing out more and more seriously. On the one hand, context-sensitive knowledge is widely spread in different domains of Semantic Web, which can be neither neglected nor avoided. On the other hand, current solutions in Semantic Web turn to be weak in resolving this problem. Therefore, the author proposes a brand new solution for the problem of context-sensitive knowledge management in this paper:Dimensional Ontology. The proposal of Dimensional Ontology is both the interior requirement of the development of Semantic Web and object request from the real world project applications.This paper firstly advances the definition of Dimensional Ontology, and then tells the relations and differences from other similar concepts. The two major features of Dimensional Ontology are summarized in this paper:(1) The scientificalness and the preciseness of its theory; (2) The feasibility and the flexibility of its application. According to the features, the paper further expatiates the theory and application of Dimensional Ontology in details. In the aspect of its theory, Dimensional Ontology follows the methodology of using Mathematical Logic to establish the theory model, which has been adopted by RDF. The author defines the abstract concepts and semantics of Dimensional Ontology using math formalisms, and establishes the mechanism of knowledge reasoning of Dimensional Ontology through a series of propositions, theorems and corollaries, which have been proofed already with rigid math methodology. It testifies the preciseness of the theory of Dimensional Ontology. In the aspect of application, the paper firstly introduces the application supporting tools developed by the author, which are used to resolve the basic, common and shared problems of using Dimensional Ontology in real world. They guarantee the great efficiency and effectiveness and raise the feasibility of the application of Dimensional Ontology. Last but not least, the paper introduces two projects in e-government domain and in biology medicine domain. They demonstrate how to put Dimensional Ontology in real world projects to resolve the problem of context-sensitive knowledge management.The innovative findings in this paper include:This paper proposes the theory framework and the application solution of Dimensional Ontology, which enriches the theory of ontology and promotes the development of ontology application. Dimensional Ontology resolves the problem of context sensitive knowledge management; the rigid Mathematical Logic proofs its scientificalness, while its abundant applications testify its feasibility. It has both theoretical meanings and realistic values.Dimensional Ontology is a brand new solution. Therefore, the difficulties of the study lie in how to proof the scientificalness of its theory and how to testify the feasibility through real world project applications.This paper is one of the scientific results of multiple research projects, which include:●State Archives Administration Science & Technology Project grant (2006-x-29):"Research on the Application of Knowledge Management Technology and Method in the Construction of Digital Archives".●National Nature Science Foundation of China grants (70773087):"Research on Ontology Evolution and Knowledge Management of Digital Library".●Cooperative project between Medical College of CAPF and Center for Studies of Information Resources of Wuhan University (06YFJMJC09800):"The Basic Construction of Ontology Molecule Knowledge Base of Silica-reduced Pulmonary Fibrosis".