Currently the ontology is restricted to Australia due to restrictions in the Species
class and the use of Australian standards to declare classes such as Treatment and
Grade. These factors mean that for an overseas timber organisation to commit to
this ontology the ontological commitment is high. A way of lessening the level of
ontological commitment for this ontology would be to merge a separate species
ontology detailing the timber species used in logging with this ontology to cover
species outside of Australia.
Representation
The ontology engineering tool Prot?©g?© (2005) was used to develop the timber ontology
based on the model drawn in UML. Prot?©g?© is a free, open source ontology
editor developed by Stanford Medical Informatics at the Stanford University School
of Medicine. Prot?©g?© is based on Java and provides support for both RDF and OWL.
Prot?©g?© develops the ontology using a hierarchical structure shown in Figure 2.
Figure 3 shows the result of checking for logical consistency in the ontology using a
logical reasoning system Racer. Racer and other reasoners are tools that can find new
facts from existing data using deductive reasoning.
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