A web site-level implementation of OWL SameAs predicate in Drupal

Patricia Esparza, University of Texas at El Paso

Abstract

The Ontology Web Language (OWL) sameAs predicate states that if the predicate holds between two Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) A and B, then an object identified by A is the same object identified by B; its purpose is to enable machines to understand that both objects are the same although they may have distinct Web identifiers, i.e., URIs. The proliferation of the use of this predicate has brought several issues to the Web, e.g., high cost of manually creating sameAs statements, inconsistent use of the predicate leading to distinct objects to be identified as being a single object, and too many sameAs statements prevent efficient reasoning with objects. The goal of this thesis is to mitigate the proliferation of statements based on the owl:sameAs predicate by avoiding its use for every single pair of object identifiers that may be represented in multiple Web sites. In other words, instead of creating the same object person in multiple Web sites, the object of type person will be created at only one Web site, which is called master server, and a materialized reference of this object will be automatically created to support the reuse of the object in many other Web sites, called receiver servers, maintaining the object the same URI used for the object in the master server. To show the effectiveness of the approach, this thesis describes a use case developed in the context of the collaboration between the NSF-funded Cyber-ShARE Center of Excellence at The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) and the TRUST Laboratory from the UTEP Computer Science Department. Both the Cyber-ShARE Center and the TRUST Laboratory have their own Web sites where they publish content such as their members' information, publications, and projects faculty is working on. The effort compared the number of commands to create users before and after the adoption of the SameAs implementation at the web-site level.

Subject Area

Computer science

Recommended Citation

Esparza, Patricia, "A web site-level implementation of OWL SameAs predicate in Drupal" (2011). ETD Collection for University of Texas, El Paso. AAI1503714.
https://scholarworks.utep.edu/dissertations/AAI1503714

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