Construction And Application Research Of Ontology

As the preliminary work of "Research on the XML IB design approach and tool" , supported by WHUT (Wuhan University of Technology) research funds, this paper focuses on the study of building domain ontologies and how to apply ontology to Database concept desigaNowadays, Web becomes the main information resource. However, it is not easy for people to get the really interested information on the web, since web pages are semi-structure or norrstructure, the hyperlinks are disordered and the data are massive and dynamic. To solve the above contradiction, Tim Bemers-Lee proposed the concept of Semantic Web. It is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation. The Semantic Web uses a nulti-level framework to achieve its goal. Ontology locates in the level from textual description to knowledge-based reasoning. So it is the key to build ontologies for the Semantic Web.An ontology is an explicit specification of a conceptualization. It defines the basic concepts and relation, which scope is a danain or much wider. This makes these concepts and relations have explicit and exclusive definitions in certain scope. Then people can ccnnunicate with machines. Although building ontologies is a very inportant issue, at present, there is no any mature methodology to guide the development of ontologies. The development of ontologies should be an engineering process the same as software development. However, compared with traditional software development, building ontologies emphasizes evolvement, share and reuse. So it has more engineering characteristics. Currently, the prevalent methodologies also use the idea of software engineering for reference to some extent. In the software engineering, spire model and prototype method both stress evolutioa Similarly, We adopt this model and method in our research.In the paper, we systemically introduce the theory of the Semantic Web and Ontology. With the guidance of theory , the purpose of this research is to build a demonstrating domain ontology based on resource of economics. During the building of ontology, we adopt OWL (web ontology language) which is reconmended by W3C as the ontology language. Under the guidance of spire model and prototype method , we use Rrotege2000 to write ontology file.In the research of ontology application, we analyze the relationship between Ontology and E-R Model, and the action of ontology in database model design. This paper inquires into the basic method that ontology is used in database E-R model design and presents a simple ontology-based design framework of database conceptual modeling. In the frairework, ontology is an iirportant part, which provide the domain knowledge to designers and help them to modeling. In the end of paper, we use a prototype system to evaluate the feasibility of applying the framework.