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Collaboration and exchange project between:

Collaborative Research Center (University of Bremen, Germany)
Contact Person: John Bateman
Department of Information and Communication Technologies (University of Trento, Italy)
Contact Person: Paolo Bouquet
Laboratory for Applied Ontology (ISTC-CNR, Italy)
Contact Person: Claudio Masolo

The goals of this project are centred on the practical and theoretical development of methods, resources and tools in formal ontology. Formal ontology is now becoming a crucial area of concern for knowledge management and re-use, the semantic web, information systems, information brokering and theoretical and practical cognitive modelling (cf., e.g., the recent special issue on ontologies of the Communications of the ACM, 2002, Vol.45).

The research groups involved in the project have been working on the development and application of computational ontologies for several years. A preliminary exchange of views, followed by a detailed planning meeting, convinced the partners that a combined research initiative would be extremely effective with a potential for considerable impact on the state of the art in ontology design and use world-wide.

The goals of the proposed project are:

the application and further development of the algebraic methods and tools produced in Bremen (CASL) to formal ontology specification and, in particular, to the ontologies library produced in Trento in the the WonderWeb project (paying particular attention to the DOLCE foundational ontology);
the development of semi-automated and formally supported translation procedures between highly expressive ontological specifications (e.g., first order logic) and restricted application-targeted knowledge representations (e.g., description logics);
the joint development of several sub-ontologies or ontological domains that are of mutual concern to both partners:
- spatial ontology
- linguistic ontology
- the ontology of social groups and interaction
the use of the algebraic methods and tool sets developed for evaluation and dissemination of these sub-ontologies to the broad ontological engineering community in terms of emerging standards such as the W3C recommended Web Ontology Language (OWL) and our own extensions.