SEMANTIC CONFLICT DETECTION IN META-DATA – A RULE BASED APPROACH by KARTHIKEYAN GIRILOGANATHAN (Under the Direction of I. Budak Arpinar)

The Web has become a source of reference for information on many subjects. Also the ability to extract semantic meta-data from Web resources has increased tremendously in recent years. Effective use of this meta-data by the users can be affected by conflicts among the meta-data. In this context, we propose a new semi-automatic process using rules to detect conflicts. This metadata can be represented in either of RDF(S), DAML or OWL and the rules are represented in RuleML. Furthermore, our technique can identify conflicts among the data at different granularities using a Relationship Ontology to simplify complex meta-data. We also describe a prototype implementation and an evaluation of this approach on a real-world dataset extracted from various Web resources. INDEX WORDS: Semantic Web, Trust, Conflict, Rule, RuleML, RDF, RDFS, DAML, OWL, and Logic DETECTING CONFLICTS IN SEMANTIC META-DATA – A RULE BASED APPROACH