The Design and Implementation of Ontology and Rules Based Knowledge Base for Transportation

The traditional transportation information inquiry mainly uses key words based on texts, and the service the inquiry system provided is one fold and only aims at one transporting means. In addition, the inquiry system lacks the comprehensive transportation inquiry combining water, land and air traffic information; also it lacks semantic level inquiry, bringing users lots of inconvenience. In view of the above questions, we proposed establishing a knowledge base of transportation information based on the OWL ontologies and SWRL rules, which can express the rich semantic knowledge of three dimension transporting means (water, land and air) in formalization. Using the ontologies through kinds, properties, instances and classifications ontologies can express structure knowledge, support knowledge automatic sorting and the instance recognition, so as to provide formal semantics for the description of many concepts involved in the transportation domain and relations between these concepts. Using the SWRL rules can solve problem of insufficient expressivity of ontologies in properties association and operation to provide support for spatial relationships reasoning. In order to make use of these knowledge effectively, we have designed a reasoning system based on the ontologies and rules with the help of Protege and its plug-ins. The system can eliminate ambiguity of the concepts and discover hidden information by reasoning, realizing knowledge and semantic level transportation information inquiry.