Thesis/Internship proposal
Mapping ORM into OWL (Ontology Web Language)

Contact: Dr. Mustafa Jarrar

Description: Given an ORM schema (/ontological commitment) one should be able to automatically generate an ontology in the OWL syntax. You need to develop a software that takes an ORM-ML file (which is an XML representation of an ORM schema) as input and then generates an OWL file. OWL is a semantic markup language for publishing and sharing ontologies on the web. OWL is developed as a vocabulary extension of RDF (the Resource Description Framework). There are three kinds of OWL syntax: OWL-Lite, OWL-DL(includes OWL Lite), and OWL-full (includes OWL-Lite). On the other side, ORM is a conceptual modeling language that has an expressive family of constraints, rich graphical notation, and very close to natural language. In comparison with OWL, ORM is much easier to understand and use specially for non IT people. However, OWL is a standard ontology language and has many inference engines supporting it (e.g. to make inference, reason about satisfiability, logical implications, etc.). The idea of mapping ORM into OWL is to enable ORM to be used as OWL interface. Please read this document for more details. Students will be given a full mapping of ORM into the DLR description logic, which will be used as the bases for mapping ORM into OWL.

Research issues (not required for internships): Formalization of ORM/OWL constraints.
Skills: Java, ORM-ML, RDF, some Description logic, etc.
See: Related proposals.