Domain-specific formal ontology of archaeology and its application in knowledge acquisition and analysis

Inherent heterogeneity and distribution of knowledge strongly prevent knowledge from sharing and reusing among different agents and software entities, and a formal ontology has been viewed as a promising means to tackle this problem. In this paper, a domain-specific formal ontology of archaeology is presented. The ontology mainly consists of three parts: archaeological categories, their relationships and axioms. The ontology not only captures the semantics of archaeological knowledge, but also provides archaeology with an explicit and formal specification of a shared conceptualization, thus making archaeological knowledge shareable and reusable across humans and machines in a structured fashion. Further, we propose a method to verify ontology correctness based on the individuals of categories. As applications of the ontology, we have developed an ontology-driven approach to knowledge acquisition from archaeological text and a question answering system for archaeological knowledge.