Domain-Specific Formal Ontology of Archaeology and Its Application in Knowledge Acquisition and Analysis

Inherent heterogeneity and distribution of knowledgestrongly prevent knowledge from sharing and reusing among differentagents and software entities, and a formal ontology has been viewed asa promising means to tackle this problem. In this paper, adomain-specific formal ontology of archaeology is presented. Theontology mainly consists of three parts: archaeological categories,their relationships and axioms. The ontology not only captures thesemantics of archaeological knowledge, but also provides archaeologywith an explicit and formal specification of a shared conceptualization,thus making archaeological knowledge shareable and reusable acrosshumans and machines in a structured fashion. Further, we propose amethod to verify ontology correctness based on the individuals ofcategories. As applications of the ontology, we have developed anontology-driven approach to knowledge acquisition from archaeologicaltext and a question answering system for archaeological knowledge.