ByNowLife: A Novel Framework for OWL and Bayesian Network Integration

An ontology-based system can currently logically reason through the Web Ontology Language Description Logic (OWL DL). To perform probabilistic reasoning, the system must use a separate knowledge base, separate processing, or third-party applications. Previous studies mainly focus on how to represent probabilistic information in ontologies and perform reasoning through them. These approaches are not suitable for systems that already have running ontologies and Bayesian network (BN) knowledge bases because users must rewrite the probabilistic information contained in a BN into an ontology. We present a framework called ByNowLife, which is a novel approach for integrating BN with OWL by providing an interface for retrieving probabilistic information through SPARQL queries. ByNowLife catalyzes the integration process by transforming logical information contained in an ontology into a BN and probabilistic information contained in a BN into an ontology. This produces a system with a complete knowledge base. Using ByNowLife, a system that already has separate ontologies and BN knowledge bases can integrate them into a single knowledge base and perform both logical and probabilistic reasoning through it. The integration not only facilitates the unity of reasoning but also has several other advantages, such as ontology enrichment and BN structural adjustment through structural and parameter learning.