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

Contact: Dr. Mustafa Jarrar

Description: You need to develop a software that takes an ontology written in the OWL syntax as input and then generates an ORM schema in the ORM-ML syntax (ORM-ML is an XML representation of an ORM schema). 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 to 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 implication, etc.). The idea of mapping OWL into ORM is to enable OWL to be visualized using the ORM graphical notation. Please read this document for more details. Students will be given a full mapping between ORM into the DLR description logic, which will be used as the bases for mapping ORM between OWL.

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