Description Logic Based Icons Semantics: An Ontology for Icons

Iconic communication is paramount today in order to assist people with disability (e.g. illiteracy) enjoying, as much as everybody else, the advances in information and communication technologies (e.g. Internet). Previous works tend to generalize iconic communication by translating iconic sentences into XML documents. Theses approaches are limited owing to the fact that an icon can hide several metaphors. In fact, the semantics of an icon is not the linguistic equivalent associated to the image, but is a set of attributes which can be used to describe the given icon. Second, an XML schema is not a knowledge representation, but just a message format. Therefore, to manage the knowledge hidden behind iconic sentences, a semantic model for icons needs to be formally defined. This paper extends previous icon models by first, introducing a description logics-based definition of icons semantics, and second, based on those formal definitions and the Web Ontology Language (OWL), we create an Ontology for Icons named IcOnto (read “eye can too”). We further use IcOnto to model some properties of the African Traditional Medicine (ATM), for illustration.