ONTOLOGY LAYER
by
Adil KABBAJ
Ontology Layer offers a possibility to create, edit and ask an ontology defined in terms of Conceptual Structures -CS- (definition, canon, individual and situation). Several conceptual lexicons can be associated to such an ontology (i.e. lexicons for English, French, Spanish, Arabic, etc.) allowing multi-lingua conceptual ontology. Since an ontology can be shared by several agents with different languages, we decided to develop a multi-lingua platform, i.e. a multi-lingua ontology and multi-lingua structures. Thus, users with different languages can express knowledge in their languages and still share all knowledge expressed in other languages. This is done in Amine thanks to the separation between conceptual elements (concept type, concept referent, relation type) and their identifiers in a specific language. Multi-lingua is one key feature of Amine platform.
Another key feature of Amine is that Amine ontology is not restricted to a specific description scheme: for the description of Conceptual Structures (the basic components of Amine ontology), the developer can use CG, KIF, a Frame-like notation, RDF, XML or any description scheme that is implemented in Java (and, in preference, that implements some interfaces of AminePlatform like AmineObject and Matching).
The ontology layer is implemented as a Java package called "kernel" that contains itself two packages: "lexicons" and "ontology". The kernel is a “stand-alone” level; the "kernel" package can be used without the other levels and even without the adoption of any description scheme (see Ontology and Samples for more detail on this possibility). Also, beside the APIs for the creation and use of an ontology with its associated lexicons, Amine offers a graphic interface, Ontology GUI, to browse, create, edit, and update an ontology.
Please, consult now the following documents:
Tests for Ontology and Lexicons
Samples for Ontology and Lexicons