Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2016
Knowledge representation is a subarea of artificial intelligence concerned with using formal symbols to represent a set of facts within a knowledge domain. Two popular knowledge representation languages, namely Petri net and ontology, are promising knowledge sharing and reusing methods in knowledge engineering. The combination of Petri net and ontology can facilitate achieving complementary advantages. Currently, many efforts have been done on knowledge sharing between Petri nets and ontologies. To investigate these issues and more importantly serve as identifying the direction of knowledge sharing between Petri nets and ontologies, in this paper we give a comprehensive literature overview of knowledge sharing between Petri net models and ontology models to satisfy the obvious need. In detail, we discuss the knowledge sharing from two aspects: the different knowledge representation approaches of ontology to represent and reason Petri net and issues of constructing Petri net from ontology. In addition, other important issues on applications and directions for future research are discussed in detail.