HR: 09:00h
AN: IN41B-05    [Abstracts]
TI: Reasoning with Quantitative Data in Ontologically-Based Software Systems
AU: * Smyth, C
EM: cpsmyth@georeferenceonline.com
AF: Georeference Online Ltd, 301-850 West Hastings St, Vancouver, BC V6C 1E1 Canada
AU: Poole, D
EM: poole@cs.ubc.ca
AF: Department of Computer Science, University Of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4 Canada
AU: Huang, E
EM: ehuang@georeferenceonline.com
AF: Georeference Online Ltd, 301-850 West Hastings St, Vancouver, BC V6C 1E1 Canada
AB: Most ontologically-oriented data structures such as RDF, RDF-S and OWL focus on the flexible and efficient representation of qualitative information. They do not make any special provisions for quantitative data, which require a special form of reasoning. In particular, quantitative data, which may pertain to points or ranges on the number line, require reasoning capabilities with respect to equality, overlap, and lack of overlap. This reasoning capability is important to making useful inferences from large volumes of quantitative data, the likes of which are often produced in the earth sciences. An ontologically-framed structure for describing the quantitative attributes of any instance or model (concept) is presented. The structure is specifically designed to facilitate specification of the quantitative data which may be referred to within an ontology, to reasoning about that data, and to being able to support explanation to the human user of the system why certain conclusions have been reached at the end of any cycle of reasoning. Use of the data structure is illustrated in an exercise comparing widely-varying rock compositions, and in the automatic generation of similarity-rankings between the different rock types.
UR: http://www.georeferenceonline.com
DE: 1000 GEOCHEMISTRY
SC: Earth and Space Science Informatics [IN]
MN: Fall Meeting 2005