Cycorp Intent of Work:
Rapid Knowledge Formation (RKF) Technology for the DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML)
Prepared by Stephen Reed
November 27, 2002
In the remainder of this fiscal year 2003, Cycorp will upgrade to OWL the three tools packaged as Semantic Web services and integrate them with other DAML contributors in the DAML Integrated Demonstration & Experiment. Most effort in 2003 will be directed at a new task, which involves the automatic mapping of DAML terms into Cyc’s reference ontology.
1.
Ontology Interpretation Tool: interprets a DAML ontology by
analyzing the lexical and semantic content of the ontology and of the web pages
marked-up by that ontology, in order to derive mappings from the local ontology
to semantic concepts in Cyc. We have
imported into Cyc all the ONA experimental ontologies and other imported
ontologies (32 in all) and as much of the instance content as the experiments
require. Each ONA XML namespace is
modeled in a separate microtheory and the DAML statements are modeled using
Cyc’s functional notation to associate a resource (Cyc constant) with a
namespace (Cyc microtheory). Imported
DAML resources will be named according to a convention that will clearly
separate different meaning senses of the same named resource. In 2003 this tool will be updated to process
OWL.
2.
Automatic Term Mapping: The suite of Cyc NL parsers will
produce a list of candidate matching concepts for each resource based upon a
parse of the resource tag name and taxonomic context. Once a set of initial Cyc mappings is identified, the Automatic
Term Tool will perform a structural comparison and correlation of the two
ontological structures (the source DAML ontology and target Cyc concepts) to
discover additional mappings between uncorrelated terms in the source ontology
and additional target concepts in Cyc.
This tool will be implemented using a goal-oriented hierarchical control
structure supporting machine learning and reflection. New semantic heuristics will be explored to take advantage of Cyc’s
commonsense knowledge about the domain in which the term mapping occurs.
3. Ontology Elaboration Tool: uses Cyc's world knowledge and common
sense inference capabilities to derive additional semantic concepts closely
related to concepts represented in the DAML ontology and then suggest
additional terms for incorporation into the ontology. Once a concept has been
isolated, the Elaboration Tool will search for semantic connections in all
directions in the Cyc KB. This will
include lateral connections derived from terms sharing the same parents and/or
the same children in an ontological hierarchical graph. Elaborations will also
be made by commonsense inference. The
Cyc KB contains a great deal of general knowledge about human activities,
including business, military, educational, and recreational activities, which
it can use to infer related concepts.
These related concepts could then be suggested as additional
elaborations of the original source ontology.
In 2003 the output will be formatted in OWL.
3.
Ontology Translation Tool: uses mappings between DAML
ontologies and Cyc knowledge base as a reference framework for deriving a
translation between the two DAML ontologies. The Ontology Translation Tool will
produce a translation between the two ontologies by deriving a translation
function. This translation function
will be the composition of: the mappings from the original ontology to a set of
equivalent Cyc concepts (or compound expressions); the mappings from the
translation target to a set of equivalent Cyc concepts (or compound
expressions); and the mappings from the two sets of Cyc concepts (or
expressions) to each other. The final
product will be a mapping from the source DAML ontology to the target DAML ontology
that does not refer to the intermediate reference ontology, Cyc. In 2003 the output will be formatted in OWL.
4. OpenCyc: We will release additional executable versions of the Cyc Upper Ontology, which will be available for downloading from www.OpenCyc.org. Cycorp will, for the first time, provide the Cyc Inference Engine and a suite of tools for creating knowledge-based applications. OpenCyc 1.0 software will be integrated with the Semantic Web for DAML ontology import and deductive queries.
5. DQL: We will release a Cyc interface compliant with DAML Query Language.
6. DAML-TIME: We will prepare a test suite of OWL statements, using DAML-TIME concepts and relationships that will exercise the Cyc temporal representation and inference engine.
Separately developed ontologies will describe an Operational Net Assessment scenario in Afghanistan. Cycorp will continue to develop mappings for these user-developed, overlapping ontologies into the Cyc reference ontology.
To date,
over 30,000 copies of OpenCyc for Linux have been downloaded. In 2003 we expect that over 100,000
downloads will occur with versions available for both Linux and Win32. In the SONAT Experiment, over 32 DAML
ontologies were imported into Cyc for unified inference.