Managing Reference: Ensuring Referential Integrity of Ontologies for the Semantic Web

Alani, Dr Harith and Dasmahapatra, Dr Srinandan and Gibbins, Dr Nicholas and Glaser, Hugh and Harris, Steve and Kalfoglou, Dr Yannis and O'Hara, Dr Kieron and Shadbolt, Prof Nigel (2002) Managing Reference: Ensuring Referential Integrity of Ontologies for the Semantic Web. In Proceedings 13th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW'02), Sigüenza (Spain).

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The diversity and distributed nature of the resources available in the semantic web poses significant challenges when these are used to help automatically build an ontology. One persistent and pervasive problem is that of the resolution or elimination of coreference that arises when more than one identifier is used to refer to the same resource. Tackling this problem is crucial for the referential integrity, and subsequently the quality of results, of any ontology-based knowledge service. We have built a coreference management service to be used alongside the population and maintenance of an ontology. An ontology based knowledge service that identifies communities of practice (CoPs) is also used to maintain the heuristics used in the coreference management system. This approach is currently being applied in a large scale experiment harvesting resources from various UK computer science departments with the aim of building a large, generic web-accessible ontology.

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