This research project is concerned with basic theory of ontology, ontology representation language, and tool which play important roles in ontological engineering.
Current research topics include;
The spectrum of ontology research spreads from account of existence in the world by philosophers to building models of concrete targets by computer scientists. In spite of its wide spectrum, each enterprise needs firm and sound basic theories such as mereotopology, theory of identity, and theory of dependence. All the three theories collectively provide us with guidlines in building concrete ontologies of interest and in investigation of definitions and operation of basic semantic links such as is-a, part-of, instance-of. Thus, the three theories play important roles not only in the basic research but in application settings.
We are currently involved in establishing an ontological semantic theory of semantic links. The following are the current topics of interest:
Major publications:
The ultimate goal of our research projects on ontology is to give the full picture of theory of knowledge. To make improvements in the study of this difficult issue, of course, it is important to accumulate huge amount of ﾒcontentsﾓ, and develop sophisticated ontology representation language as fundamental ﾒformﾓ of knowledge. In the research project on the latter issue, we have been investigating the variety of fundamental topics concerning ontology, for example,
Based on the analysis, we have been developing an ontology representation language.
In practice, it is really hard to develop an automatic problem solving system which can cope with a variety of problems we expect to be solved by computer systems. The main reason is that the knowledge needed for solving the problems which varies considerably depending on the properties of the problems. This fact implies that we should realize the common knowledge, sometimes ignored, that users have more knowledge than computers. From this point of view, importance of user-centric system [DeBellis, 96] is now widely shared by many researchers.
End-user programming environment, as the incarnation of the philosophy, provides end-users with a variety of functional components which stand for the concepts appearing in the target task and allows them to build their own problem solving models in terms of those components. In such an environment, end-users can easily describe his/her knowledge by using the components.
To realize an end-user programming environment, it is necessary that the environment should
Our research on task ontology concerns all of the above requirements for end-user programming environments. In principle, task ontology is a systematic definition of the concepts appearing in end-usersﾕ understanding of problem solving.
We expect that, in terms of ontology, the environment would be able to capture the end-usersﾕ conceptual model of problem solving in right abstract level and provide them with useful programming guidance.
Our research project aims at developing a task-ontology (static user model) embedded in the environment which satisfies all the four requirements above.
Conceptual LEvel Programming Environment, named CLEPE, is an environment for end-users to describe problem solving knowledge based on the task ontology. The target tasks of CLEPE are rather routine tasks, such as scheduling, salary calculation, and so on.
In CLEPE, end-users describe their own problem solving knowledge in a diagrammatic representation with a constrained set of natural language sentences. And then, he/she can verify systemﾕs interpretation of the description using the conceptual level execution functionality of CLEPE. The continuity from the diagrammatic representation to conceptual computational semantics is one of the key features of CLEPE,
In this environment end-users can
Major publications:
To the list of all publications
The goal of this research is to develop a computer environment supporting building and using of ontologies. We consider that the process of building of an ontology consists of the following five steps;
The current research aims include to develop the following two subsystems;
The former is mainly designed to support the building of domain ontologies initially from the documents. This system is based on the ontology building methodology called AFM (Activity-First Method) where task analysis helps the ontology authors to limit and simplify the domain concepts.
The later system enables us to browse and edit the ontologies in the ontology server through the network using the web browsers.
Figure 1: Framework of the Environment Figure 2：A snapshot of the ontology editor