In this paper, two kinds of vocabulary consent relations are proposed as a mechanism for the partial reuse and integration of ontologies, and then a formal semantics of consent relationships is given to support such a mechanism. Particularly, some semantic conditions are proposed to guarantee the expected consequences of vocabulary consent relationships. The issue about reasoning with the given semantic framework is also briefly discussed.

Ontology matching is a crucial task of enabling interoperation betweenWeb applications using different but related ontologies. Due to the size and the monolithic nature, large-scale ontologies regarding real world domains cause a new challenge to current ontology matching techniques. In this paper, we propose a method for partition-based block matching that is practically applicable to large class hierarchies, which are one of the most common kinds of large-scale ontologies. Based on both structural affinities and linguistic similarities, two large class hierarchies are partitioned into small blocks respectively, and then blocks from different hierarchies are matched by combining the two kinds of relatedness found via predefined anchors as well as virtual documents between them. Preliminary experiments demonstrate that the partitionbased block matching method performs well on our test cases derived from Web directory structures.

In the Semantic Web, RDF (Resource Description Framework) and RDF Schema are commonly used to describe metadata. There are a great many RDF data in current web, therefore, efficient storage and retrieval of large RDF data sets is required. So far, several RDF storage and query system are developed. According to the inference strategy they used, they can be classified into two categories, one exclusively use forward chaining strategy; the other exclusively use backward chaining strategy. In most cases, the query performance of the former is superior to that of the latter. However, in some cases, the disadvantage of larger storage space may at some point outweigh the advantage of faster querying. Further, the existing systems that exclusively use forward chaining strategy have not yet presented a good solution to the deletion operation by now. In this paper, we design a RDF storage and query framework with flexible inference strategy, which can combine forward and backward chaining inference strategies. In addition, a new solution to the deletion operation is also given within our framework. The feasibility of our framework is illustrated by primary experiments.

In current Semantic Web community, some researches have been done on ranking ontologies, while very little is paid to ranking vocabularies within ontology. However, finding important vocabularies within a given ontology will bring benefits to ontology indexing, ontology understanding and even ranking vocabularies from a global view. In this paper, Vocabulary Dependency Graph (VDG) is proposed to model the dependencies among vocabularies within an ontology, and Textual Score of Vocabulary (TSV) is established based on the idea of virtual documents. And then a Double Focused PageRank algorithm is applied on VDG and TSV to rank vocabulary within ontology. Primary experiments demonstrate that our approach turns out to be useful in finding important vocabularies within ontology.

Interactive multi-agent system improves reusability of agents by separating application design from agent design. However, it remains difficult for application designers (usually non-computer professionals) to script massive multi-agents. This is especially true for scripting hundreds of NPCs (Non Player Characters, agents) hosted by hostile, dynamic and complex 3D (threedimensional) environments in military simulation. Out of perspective of interaction between agents and environments, namely virtual spaces, we introduce virtual space ontologies to facilitate interaction between humans and agents. Three advantages are obtained by using virtual space ontologies: 1) A hybrid approach of integrating qualitative and quantitative spatial reasoning is achieved so that application designers can specify arguments of actions (scenario primitives) qualitatively. 2) Primitive actions of agents are abstracted hierarchically so that application designers can sketch scenarios for units of agents. 3) Better intent communication between humans and agents is realized so that application users can control agents easily in real time.