Mr. Rami Hudrob defended on Saturday 11-2-2012 his thesis in computing before a committee of Dr. Mustafa Jarrar as chair, and the membership of both Dr. Wasel Ghanem and Dr. Mahmoud Alsaheb, titled “On Using a Graphical Notation in Ontology Engineering”.
Mr. Rami, who is a researcher and an active member in Sina institute, presented his thesis, illustrating his work and accomplishments in the field of Ontology engineering, and its scientific importance. Finally he finished his presentation by stating the results of his research and recommendations for future work.
The thesis first presented what an Object-Role Modeling (ORM) language is, which is a method that allows the semantics of a universe to be modeled using natural languages and diagrams. The thesis also clarified the concept of Web Ontology Language 2 (OWL2), which is a family of knowledge representation languages for authoring ontologies. Ontology formally represents knowledge as a set of concepts with a domain, and relationships between those concepts. It can be used to describe that domain.
OWL2 has a number of constructs and relations that the ORM is not able to represent in its current state. These constructs are all studied carefully and this thesis succeeded in finding a way to extend ORM notation to cover all OWL2 constructs which are not currently covered by ORM. This success creates a framework that allows engineering OWL2 ontologies graphically using ORM.
