The CHIL Ontology

The CHIL software environment comprises a plethora of Perceptual Components, which are based on image- and speech recognition technologies. CHIL services define several different scenarios such as meetings or other human-to-human interactions. For the CHIL project, an ontology is being developed to provide a high level description of the CHIL domain of discourse that can be used to build intelligent applications. It is based upon the W3C specification of the Web Ontology Language OWL.

The Full CHIL Ontology is being devised by defining the relevant concepts of the CHIL domain and using these concepts to specify properties of objects and individuals occurring in the domain. The ontology already covers the most prominent CHIL scenarios and is constantly being extended to become the common vocabulary for a broad range of multimodal applications. As of today, “intelligent” refers to the ability to automatically infer implicit consequences from explicitly represented knowledge. Leveraging the expressiveness of the Web Ontology Language OWL, the CHIL Ontology provides a description of the CHIL world that can be efficiently used to build intelligent applications.

The CHIL Ontology Fragment is a small excerpt of the Full CHIL Ontology with minor changes, mainly used for smart room description and perceptual component management. It is mainly used to speed up development with a lean module that only contains those parts of the full ontology that are vital for our current areas of development.

You may want to browse through the CHIL ontology modules and related resources which are listed separatedly on our subversion server.

Fig. 1: Class Hierarchy of the CHIL Ontology Fragment (as of March 14th, 2012)

Fig. 1 shows the class hierarchy of the CHIL Ontology Fragment, a slightly modified excerpt from the Full CHIL Ontology, which we are currently using for building perceptual component registry, management, and retrieval.

• Web Ontology Language (OWL)

  http://www.w3.org/2004/OWL/
  This is the Web Consortium's web page on OWL. It contains many links to the most relevant specifications, APIs, tutorial, tools, projects, applications, and sample ontologies.

• WonderWeb OWL Ontology Validator

  http://phoebus.cs.man.ac.uk:9999/OWL/Validator
  Given an ontology in RDF, this validator checks if it is valid OWL Lite, OWL DL, or OWL Full. It also generates abstract OWL syntax for the ontology.

• Query Languages for OWL and RDF

  • A Comparison of RDF Query Languages

    http://www.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/WBS/pha/rdf-query/
    The AIFB provides a survey on a couple of query languages for RDF.

  • OWL Query Language (OWL-QL)

    http://ksl.stanford.edu/projects/owl-ql/
    OWL-QL specifies an XML-based syntax for querying ontological information from a knowledge base, using a simple request-response model.

  • RDQL - A Query Language for RDF

    http://www.w3.org/Submission/2004/SUBM-RDQL-20040109/

  • The SeRQL query language

    http://www.openrdf.org/doc/users/ch06.html

  • Versa, the RDF query language

    http://uche.ogbuji.net/tech/rdf/versa/

  • Primer: Getting into RDF & Semantic Web using N3

    http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/Primer.html

  • The RDF Query Language (RQL)

    http://139.91.183.30:9090/RDF/RQL/

  • RxPath

    http://rx4rdf.liminalzone.org/RxPath

• OWL with Rules

  • A Proposal for an OWL Rules Language

    http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~horrocks/DAML/Rules/
    This is the original proposal for an OWL with Rules language. There is also a paper available, see http://www.www2004.org/proceedings/docs/1p723.pdf . The original proposal has been superseded by SWRL (see below).

  • SWRL: A Semantic Web Rule Language Combining OWL and RuleML

    http://www.w3.org/Submission/SWRL/
    SWRL supersedes the original OWL Rules Language proposal (see above). Kaon2 (see http://kaon2.semanticweb.org/ ) maybe will be the first functioning implementation of SWRL.

• Resource Description Framework (RDF)

  http://www.w3.org/RDF/
  RDF, the Resource Description Framework, is (among other applications) used as an XML exchange syntax for OWL.

• OWL Web Ontology Language XML Presentation Syntax (OWL-XML)

  http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-xmlsyntax/
  While RDF is a widely used exchange syntax for OWL based on a well-developed infrastructure, its general framework characteristic is not adequate for direct manipulation of ontological data, since mapping from high-level OWL abstract syntax to low-level RDF triples generally means loosing compactness and structurally coherent placement of related information. OWL-XML is meant as an exchange syntax for OWL that can be used as a replacement for RDF. OWL-XML sticks close to the abstract syntax of OWL.