Integrating Ontologies and Rules in a Semantic Business: From Policies to Operation

Abstract

It is a challenge in a business to enable the right people to interact in their own way with the right part of their business application. We distinguish between three views on the business organization: (1) the view of the business analyst via business policies and rules, (2) the view of the knowledge engineer via ontologies and rules, and (3) the view of the IT department via an operationalization in applications. One can glue those three views together by considering (1) the acquisition of ontologies and rules from natural language documents such as business policies and rules, (2) their separate management and maintenance, and (3) their transparent operationalization in IT applications.

In the tutorial, we give an overview of the above three steps and focus on (2), the management of combinations of ontologies and rules. In doing so, we touch upon topics such as Natural Language processing (NLP), ontology languages such as OWL 2, and logical and production rules, with attention for the integration of ontologies and rules and its arising issues.