Year

2007

Degree Name

PhD in Information systems

Department

Information Systems School of Information Systems and Technology, Faculty of Informatics

Abstract

The vision of the Semantic Web is to enable content of web resources to be interpreted and processed by software agents. Ontology provides a means to share and reuse data associated with web resources in a manner that can be autonomously performed by software agents. In the context of knowledge representation, ontology represents the abstract world of web resources in the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web will comprise of small, simple ontologies constructed by individual users. It is unlikely that ontology will be built from scratch each time. On the other hand, it is more likely that ontology will be adopted and modified from existing ontology. Why is ontology revision important? Very often, ontology exists in a particular period of timeline is designed based on the purpose of a specific domain of interest at that instance of time. Over time, ontology needs to be revised due to changes in domain, content, requirements, or structural representation. In this regard, ontology is the beliefs that the agents need to reference to in order to perform task in an autonomous way. As ontology evolves, beliefs in agents also evolve and knowledge gained by agents must be reflected in the ontology.

This research investigates issues of ontology revision from the theoretical foundation of the belief revision theory. The AGM model of the coherence theory in belief revision is of particular relevant in this research. The AGM model uses three operations of expansion, contraction and revision in conjunction with the concept of epistemic entrenchment to revise the belief set. This research develops an ontology revision framework to manage the ontology revision process. The research will also illustrate a vision in which the practicability of this approach can be applied in e-commerce.

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Unless otherwise indicated, the views expressed in this thesis are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the University of Wollongong.