Skip Navigation


Journal of Logic and Computation Advance Access originally published online on December 5, 2007
Journal of Logic and Computation 2008 18(3):341-359; doi:10.1093/logcom/exm074
This Article
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow All Versions of this Article:
18/3/341    most recent
exm074v1
Right arrow References
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Wang, S.
Right arrow Articles by Pan, J. Z.
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Original Articles

The Semantic Processing of Continuous Quantities for Discrete Terms in Ontologies

Shenghui Wang and David Rydeheard

School of Computer Science, University of Manchester, UK. E-mail: wangs{at}cs.man.ac.uk,david{at}cs.man.ac.uk

Jeff Z. Pan

Department of Computing Science, University of Aberdeen, UK. E-mail: jpan{at}csd.abdn.ac.uk

Received 30 July 2006.


  Abstract

We consider continuous quantities that are used to describe the physical world, such as colour, shape, sound, texture and spatial and temporal arrangements. Natural languages are not adept at describing these quantities, nor are they easily incorporated into ontologies in the form of discrete terms. In this article, we analyse the way that natural languages handle continuous quantities, propose a general semantics based on metric spaces, and describe how to treat semantic values computationally, so that we may automate the processing of texts which describe continuous quantities allowing, for example, query evaluation and the integration of multiple texts. This provides a basis for incorporating these quantities into ontologies and combining their semantics with automated reasoning tools. We run a series of experiments to evaluate the semantics, the general framework, and the computational system we have developed.

Keywords: Practical semantics; metric semantic model; continuous quantities; similarity; information integration and query evaluation


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?




Disclaimer:
Please note that abstracts for content published before 1996 were created through digital scanning and may therefore not exactly replicate the text of the original print issues. All efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, but the Publisher will not be held responsible for any remaining inaccuracies. If you require any further clarification, please contact our Customer Services Department.