Interactive elicitation of relation semantics for the semantic Web

This paper presents the workflow and architecture of the Relation Semantics Elicitation Prototype (RSEP). RSEP has been developed to address the limitations of the Description Logic based constructs of the Web Ontology Language (OWL) with respect to capturing the intrinsic nature of binary relations. After extracting relation definitions from an input OWL ontology, RSEP interactively elicits the intrinsic semantics of these relations from knowledge providers and appends this elicited knowledge in OWL Full syntax to the input ontology. RSEP has been tested on the IEEE Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO) and the results are presented in this paper. Preliminary results from using the elicited relation semantics to cluster relations from SUMO and to arrange them taxonomically are also presented to highlight their potential contribution to knowledge interoperability and reuse on the Semantic Web.