Research Of Ontology Approaches And Their Applications In Spatio-temporal Reasoning

With the developments of Semantic Web, Search Engine, Spatio-temporal Reasoning and Knowledge Engineering, ontology approaches have gained much progress and become the focus of many researchers. Benefits of ontology approach include: Ontologies provide a common vocabulary and definition of rules for use by independently developed services; Agreements among companies, organizations sharing common services can be made with regard to their usage and the meaning of relevant concepts can be expressed unambiguously; By composing component ontologies, mapping ontologies to one another and brokering terminology among participating resources and services, independently developed systems, agents and services can work together to share information and processes consistently, accurately, and completely; Ontologies also facilitate conversations among agents to collect, process, fuse, and exchange information; Improves search accuracy by enabling contextual search using concept definitions and relations among them instead of (in addition to) statistical relevance of keywords.Under the background of Semantic Web techniques and Spatio-temporal information representation and reasoning, the paper carries out research on ontology approaches. The research puts focus on these fields: Fuzzy interval extended description logic (DL), ontology acquisition techniques using WordNet system, ontology representation languages RDFS, DAML+OIL, OIL and OWL, and their different characteristics, the architecture of Web-based ontology server and ontology middleware system, spatio-temporal models' comparing and analysizing, research progress in spatio-temporal reasoning and ontology representation of spatio-temporal information. The research route combines theory and practice together. On the basis of a through analysis of key ontology techniques, research status and development trends, we studied some kernel ontology techniques. We put forward fuzzy interval extended description logic (DL), an ontology learning model utilizing WordNet system, the Web-based ontology server architectrue and a model of ontology middleware in expert system BAPDES. We analysis the ontology representation languages for the Semantic Web and compared them. In the field of spatio-temporal reasoning, we analysis the relation between two well-known spatio-temporal models and give the spatio-temporal ontology realization using Description Logic system. The main contributions of the paper is listed below:(1): The paper overviews the research works of ontology approaches, discusses the definition of ontology and it's characteristics. It introduces DLs which are logical foundation of OWL and gives a definition of a fuzzy interval extended DL. These form the basis of further discussions.(2): The paper studies the relevant problems in the process of ontology acquisition, introduces some representative ontology learning systems, analysis the architecture and assessment standards for ontology learning systems.(3): The paper studies the system construction problems using ontology techniques. The studies conclude: Web-based ontology server architecture design and its query interface design; the design of ontology middleware model in expert system BAPDES and a design of search engine using ontology techniques.(4): The paper introduces RDF,RDFS,OIL,DAML+OIL and OWL. The paper briefly introduces each ontology language and gives an analysis and comparison of these languages, points out their characteristics with respect to some key aspects.(5): The paper discusses the development of temporal reasoning and spatial reasoning from three aspects: ontology, representation model and reasoning methods, then we summarize the research progress of spatio-temporal reasoning. We discuss the problems remained and point out the future direction.(6): The paper explores the links between two well-known models in spatial and temporal reasoning — Allen's Interval Algebra in temporal reasoning and the RCC model in spatial reasoning. We show that the temporal relations identified by I...