Encoding Classifications as Lightweight Ontologies

Giunchiglia, Fausto and Marchese, Maurizio and Zaihrayeu, Ilya (2006) Encoding Classifications as Lightweight Ontologies. UNSPECIFIED.

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    Abstract

    Classifications have been used for centuries with the goal of cataloguing and searching large sets of objects. In the early days it was mainly books; lately it has also become Web pages, pictures and any kind of electronic information items. Classifications describe their contents using natural language labels, which has proved very effective in manual classification. However natural language labels show their limitations when one tries to automate the process, as they make it very hard to reason about classifications and their contents. In this paper we introduce the novel notion of Formal Classification, as a graph structure where labels are written in a propositional concept language. Formal Classifications turn out to be some form of lightweight ontologies. This, in turn, allows us to reason about them, to associate to each node a normal form formula which univocally describes its contents, and to reduce document classification to reasoning about subsumption.

    Item Type: Departmental Technical Report
    Department or Research center: Information Engineering and Computer Science
    Subjects: Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA076 Computer software
    Report Number: DIT-06-016
    Repository staff approval on: 27 Mar 2006

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