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Ontologies in engineering: the OntoDB/OntoQL platform

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Abstract

Ontologies have been increasingly used over the past few decades in a wide range of application domains spanning both academic and industrial communities. As ontologies are the cornerstone of the Semantic Web, the technologies developed in this context, including ontology languages, specialized databases and query languages, have become widely used. However, the expressiveness of the proposed ontology languages does not always cover the needs of specific domains. For instance, engineering is a domain for which the LIAS laboratory has proposed dedicated solutions with a worldwide recognition. The underlying assumptions made in the context of the Semantic Web, an open and distributed environment, do not apply to the controlled environments of our projects where the correctness and completeness of modeling can be guaranteed to a certain degree. As a consequence, we have developed over the last decades a specialized standard ontology language named PLIB associated with the OntoDB/OntoQL platform to manage ontological engineering data within a database. The goal of this paper is threefold: (1) to share our experience in manipulating ontologies in the engineering domain by describing their specificities and constraints; (2) to define a comprehensive classification of ontologies with respect to three main research communities: Artificial Intelligence, Databases and Natural Language Processing and (3) to present a persistent solution, called OntoDB, for managing extremely large semantic data sets associated with an ontological query language, called OntoQL. These objectives are illustrated by several examples that show the effectiveness and interest of our propositions in several industrial projects in different domains including vehicle manufacturing and CO\(_2\) storage.

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Notes

  1. Entity Relationship Conference 2011 Panel on New Directions for Conceptual Modeling.

  2. http://www.freebase.com.

  3. We use the symbol \(2^{E}\) to denote the power set of E.

  4. To simplify notation, we extend all functions \(f\) by \(f(\emptyset )=\emptyset \).

  5. http://www.lias-lab.fr/forge/projects/ontodb.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been initiated under the supervision of the late Professor Guy PIERRA. He has been the initiator of the OntoDB project. We are grateful for his work and his investment. We learned a lot from his experience and advice. The authors would also like to thank the persons who have contributed to the development of the OntoDB/OntoQL platform and in particular Hondjack Dehainsala for the development of OntoDB during his PhD thesis and Dung Xuan Nguyen for his PhD thesis on data integration.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. IRIT/ ENSHEEIHT, Toulouse, France

    Yamine Ait-Ameur

  2. LIAS/ISAE-ENSMA and University of Poitiers, 1, Avenue Clement Ader, 86960, Futuroscope Cedex, France

    Mickaël Baron, Ladjel Bellatreche & Stéphane Jean

  3. CRITT Informatique, Futuroscope Cedex, France

    Eric Sardet

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  1. Yamine Ait-Ameur
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  2. Mickaël Baron
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  3. Ladjel Bellatreche
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Correspondence to Ladjel Bellatreche.

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Communicated by C.-S. Lee.

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Ait-Ameur, Y., Baron, M., Bellatreche, L. et al. Ontologies in engineering: the OntoDB/OntoQL platform. Soft Comput 21, 369–389 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-015-1633-5

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