Abstract. This paper describes a proposed new syntax that can be used to write and read OWL ontologies in Controlled Natural Language (CNL): a well-defined subset of the English language. Following the lead of Manchester OWL Syntax in making OWL more accessible for non-logicians, and building on the previous success of Schwitter’s PENG (Processable English), the proposed Sydney OWL Syntax enables two-way translation and generation of grammatically correct full English sentences to and from OWL 1.1 functional syntax. Used in conjunction with OWL tools, it is designed to facilitate ontology construction and editing by enabling authors to write an OWL ontology in a defined subset of English. It also improves readability and understanding of OWL statements or whole ontologies, by enabling them to be read as English sentences. It is hoped that by providing the option of an intuitive, easy to use English syntax which requires no specialized knowledge, the broader community will be far more likely to develop and benefit from Semantic Web applications. This paper is a discussion paper covering the scope, design, and examples of Sydney OWL Syntax in use, and the authors invite feedback on all aspects of the proposal via email to

Abstract. OBO is an ontology language that has often been used for modeling ontologies in the life sciences. Its definition is relatively informal, so, in this paper, we provide a clear specification for OBO syntax and semantics via a mapping to OWL. This mapping also allows us to apply existing Semantic Web tools and techniques to OBO. We show that Semantic Web reasoners can be used to efficiently reason with OBO ontologies. Furthermore, we show that grounding the OBO language in formal semantics is useful for the ontology development process: using an OWL reasoner, we detected a likely modeling error in one OBO ontology. 1

Abstract. Four-valued description logic has been proposed to reason with description logic based inconsistent knowledge bases, mainly ALC. This approach has a distinct advantage that it can be implemented by invoking classical reasoners to keep the same complexity as classical semantics. In this paper, we further study how to extend the four-valued semantics to more expressive description logics, such as SHIQ, and to more tractable description logics including EL++, DL-Lite, and Horn-DLs. The most effort we spend defining the four-valued semantics of expressive four-valued description logics is on keeping the reduction from four-valued semantics to classical semantics as in the case of ALC; While for tractable description logics, we mainly focus on how to maintain their tractability when adopting four-valued semantics. 1

Abstract. This paper describes an hybrid method combining symbolic and numerical techniques for annotating brain Magnetic Resonance images. Existing automatic labelling methods are mostly statistical in nature and do not work very well in certain situations such as the presence of lesions. The goal is to assist them by a knowledge-based method. The system uses statistical method for generating a sufficient set of initial facts for fruitful reasoning. Then, the reasoning is supported by an OWL DL ontology enriched by SWRL rules. The experiments described were achieved using the KAON2 reasoner for inferring the annotations. 1

Abstract. Classical ontologies are not suitable to represent imprecise or vague pieces of information, which has led to fuzzy extensions of Description Logics. In order to support an early acceptance of the OWL 1.1 ontology language, we present DeLorean, the first reasoner that supports a fuzzy extension of the Description Logic SROIQ, closely equivalent to it. It implements some interesting optimization techniques, whose usefulness is shown in a preliminary empirical evaluation. 1

Abstract. A large library of biomedical ontologies has been developed in the OBO format, including important ontologies such as the Gene Ontology (GO). These resources have the potential to contribute to the Semantic Web in the life sciences domain. In particular, they allow the annotation of distributed experimental data in using a controlled and shared vocabulary. As the Web Ontology Language OWL is the W3C recommended standard for ontologies, converting OBO ontologies to OWL becomes an important need: it will facilitate the sharing and reuse of this important resource and make the expanding range of OWL tools available for use with OBO ontologies. In order to achieve this, we propose a formalisation of the OBO syntax in terms of a BNF style grammar, and a formalisation of the semantics of (a large part of) OBO in terms of a mapping to OWL 1.1. This demonstrates that the OWL 1.1 extension of OWL allows nearly all of the OBO language to be captured. 1

Abstract. General purpose query interfaces to relational databases can expose vast amounts of content to the Semantic Web. In this paper, we discuss Automapper, a tool that automatically generates data source and mapping ontologies using OWL and SWRL. We also describe the use of these ontologies in our Semantic Distributed Query architecture, an implementation for mapping RDF queries to disparate data sources, including SQL-compliant databases, using SPARQL as the query language. This paper covers Automapper functionality that exploits some of the expressiveness of OWL to produce more accurate translations. A comparison with related work on Semantic Web access to relational databases is also provided as well as an investigation into the use of OWL 1.1.

m e t h o d o l o g y

This article suggests an approach which allows the costly analysis of processes (e.g., in serviceoriented architectures) for benchmarking to be partially automated, so that the performance indicators, as well as qualitative differences between processes become apparent. The approach is based on using appropriate ontologies, which make the process models both syntactically and semantically comparable. In this article, we present a conceptual model for this new approach to process benchmarking, a framework, as well as a software prototype for analyzing and comparing individual process models. We provide an overview of our multi-method evaluation methodology and delineate the technical, conceptual, and economic evaluation perspectives with their