Web Ontology Language (OWL) which has been used since as a robust and efficient cyber security

system to safeguard cyber assets tends to have limitations which are its reliance on the single “is-a”
relation and the emulation of other relations via complex object and data properties. This paper states
that Pace University extended OWL to support Knowledge Graph as a replacement to better support
knowledge representation and decision making. A Knowledge Graph is an extension of OWL which is
serialized in RDF/XML format which extends Web Ontology Language (OWL) by relating two classes with
custom relations can however fill up the void and gaps left by OWL itself because custom relations
present flexibility in relating two classes.

Two issues were to be resolved before the use of these knowledge graphs, syntax validation of knowledge
graph had to be generic to validate any knowledge graph and visual navigation capabilities to any
knowledge graph had to be provided. Syntax validation is important because KGs are complex and they
use special syntax for easier declarations of custom relations. Their correctness is fundamental to decision
making. The RDF/XML serialized knowledge graph cannot be syntax validated using the W3C XML OWL
Schema because it supports only owl documents serialized in OWL/XML format. Third parties RDF
schemas will not work because it has only “rdf” namespace and will not recognize Pace “rel” namespace.
To address the issue of validation a custom Pace Knowledge Graph Syntax Validator was designed to
validate KGs’ inputs before visual navigation. Three functions were created in Pace Jena to facilitate visual
navigation capabilities.

The cyber security threat filtration system algorithm was designed and syntax validation and visual
navigation challenges were dealt over with. DOM Parse was used to resolve syntax validation using
DomParse.java written in xml. Validation of any knowledge graph will require that its relation elements
be declared in the Pace Knowledge Graph schema. To solve this problem, they designed a custom
PaceKGSV to validate any inputted knowledge graph before it is parsed by Pace Jena to facilitate visual
navigation capabilities for the knowledge graph. They used the Multiple Pass Syntax Validation (MPSV)
Algorithm to validate knowledge graphs by running the ValidateKnowledgeGraph.java they created.

The first use case was to build cyber security threat filtration system which should recognize and reconcile
and direct different threats to appropriate channels. In order to define and create the classes, a class
hierarchy is constructed of the cyber security terminology using a top down approach and the benefit of
reconciling these different versions of terminologies is to use the information collected to build a powerful
filtration process based on knowledge representation. The second use case was based on web-based
knowledge graph navigation and syntax validation. The WebBrowser.java takes an input well-formed
knowledge document and uses functions to retrieve all classes and relations and displays them in an html
page. This program presented the user the ability to navigate the classes and relations of the knowledge
graph.

Conclusively, the outcomes of this research proved that the function could reach the expected goal. They
showed the algorithm for classifying and filtering cyber events and send them to appropriate channels for
mitigation and resolution. They extended the ontology to a knowledge graph which simplified the relation
of classes. The proposed approach accomplished this by designing and implementing the Multiple Pass
Syntax Validation algorithm with Dom Parsing to declare any new custom relations in the Pace custom
schema before the knowledge graph is syntax validated.