A framework to specify, extract and manage topic maps driven by ontology

ABSTRACT

The ability to extract and merge data that from documents (or databases) of different types, in order to acquire knowledge from a vast repository of information, is of unquestionable value. However that desirable integration is not an easy task. Different approaches can be followed to achieve it, ranging from the merge of resources (implying their conversion to a common format) till the fusion of the extracted parts. The idea is to interoperate those resources keeping them independent, without changes or transformations, creating over them an integration layer that gives us a general overview, as the information slices were gathered. This is possible creating a semantic network, or a conceptual map, over the resources, which relates data items among them mapping each one to its different occurrences in the repository; formally speaking, that conceptual map corresponds to the ontology that describes the knowledge we want to acquire. In this paper, we introduce Metamorphosis, a Topic Maps oriented environment to extract data from heterogeneous information repositories and to generate a browser and conceptual navigator for the extracted knowledge.

REFERENCES

• 1: R. Barta. AsTMa! Bond University, TR., 2003. http://astma.it.bond.edu.au/constraining.xsp.
• 2: M. Biezunsky, M. Bryan, and S. Newcomb. ISO/IEC 13250 - Topic Maps. ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC34, December 1999. http://www.y12.doe.gov/sgml/sc34/document/0129.pdf.
• 3: R. Bourret. XML and Databases, 2005. http://www.rpbourret.com/xml/XMLAndDatabases.htm.
• 4: E. Freese. Using Topic Maps for the representation, management and discovery of knowledge. In XML Europe 2000 Proceedings. http://www.gca.org/papers/xmleurope2000/papers/s22-01.html, June 2000.
• 5: L. M. Garshol and G. Moore. Topic Maps - Data Model. In ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC34. http://www.isotopicmaps.org/sam/sam-model/, January 2005.
• 6: N. Guarino. Formal Ontology and Information Systems. In Conference on Formal Ontology (FOIS98), 1998. http://www.ladseb.pd.cnr.it/infor/Ontology/Papers/FOIS98.pdf.
• 7: N. A. Kipp. A mathematical formalism for the topic maps reference model. Draft paper submitted to ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34 Committee, 2003. http://www.isotopicmaps.org/tmrm/0441.htm.
• 8: Neal Leavitt, Whatever Happened to Object-Oriented Databases?, Computer, v.33 n.8, p.16-19, August 2000
• 9: G. R. Librelotto, J. C. Ramalho, and P. R. Henriques. Constraining topic maps: a TMCL declarative implementation. In Extreme Markup Languages 2005: Proceedings. IDEAlliance.
• 10: Prasenjit Mitra , Gio Wiederhold, An Algebra for Semantic Interoperability of Information Sources, Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE International Symposium on Bioinformatics and Bioengineering, p.174, March 04-06, 2001
• 11: M. Nishikawa and G. Moore. Requirements for a Topic Map Constraint Language JTC 1 NP Number. ISO/IEC 19756. ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC34 N0405, 2003. http://www.y12.doe.gov/sgml/sc34/document/0405.htm.
• 12: Jack Park , Sam Hunting , Douglas C. Engelbart, XML Topic Maps: Creating and Using Topic Maps for the Web, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 2002
• 13: S. Pepper and G. Moore. XML Topic Maps (XTM) 1.0. TopicMaps.Org Specification, August 2001. http://www.topicmaps.org/xtm/1.0/.
• 14: M. Rys. TSIMMIS - The Stanford-IBM Manager of Multiple Information Sources, April 1998. http://www-db.stanford.edu/tsimmis/tsimmis.html.
• 15: R. Volz. KAON REVERSE, 2003. http://kaon.semanticweb.org/alphaworld/reverse/view.
• 16: H. Wache, T. Vögele, U. Visser, H. Stuckenschmidt, G. Schuster, H. Neumann, and S. Hübner. Ontology-based integration of information---a survey of existing approaches. In H. Stuckenschmidt, editor, IJCAI-01 Workshop: Ontologies and Information Sharing, pages 108--117, 2001.
• 17: A. Wrightson. Topic Maps and Knowledge Representation. Ontopia, February 2001. http://www.ontopia.net/topicmaps/materials/kr-tm.html

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.1 Content Analysis and Indexing
          Subjects: Abstracting methods

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.1 Content Analysis and Indexing
          Subjects: Dictionaries; Thesauruses; Linguistic processing; Indexing methods

General Terms:
Algorithms, Documentation, Experimentation, Languages, Management, Reliability, Standardization

Keywords:
information systems, interoperability, ontologies, semantic web, topic maps