User:Pcholakis/sandbox

This article is about ontology in information science. For the study of the nature of being, see Ontology. Information science General aspects Information access · Information architecture Information management Information retrieval Information seeking · Information society Knowledge organization · Ontology Philosophy of information Science, technology and society Related fields and sub-fields Bibliometrics · Categorization Censorship · Classification Computer data storage · Cultural studies Data modeling · Informatics Information technology Intellectual freedom Intellectual property · Memory Library and information science Preservation · Privacy Portal icon Information science portal v t e In computer science and information science, an ontology is a formal naming and definition of the types, properties, and interrelationships of the entities that really or fundamentally exist for a particular domain of discourse.

An ontology compartmentalizes the variables needed for some set of computations and establishes the relationships between them.[1][2]

The fields of artificial intelligence, the Semantic Web, systems engineering, software engineering, biomedical informatics, library science, enterprise bookmarking, and information architecture all create ontologies to limit complexity and to organize information. The ontology can then be applied to problem solving.

Contents [hide] 1 Overview 2 History 3 Components 4 Types 4.1 Domain ontology 4.2 Upper ontology 4.3 Hybrid ontology 5 Visualization 6 Engineering 6.1 Editor 6.2 Learning 7 Languages 8 Published examples 9 Libraries 10 Examples of applications 11 Criticisms 12 See also 13 References 14 Further reading 15 External links Overview[edit] The term ontology has its origin in philosophy and has been applied in many different ways. The word element onto- comes from the Greek ὤν, ὄντος, ("being", "that which is"), present participle of the verb εἰμί ("be"). The core meaning within computer science is a model for describing the world that consists of a set of types, properties, and relationship types. There is also generally an expectation that the features of the model in an ontology should closely resemble the real world (related to the object).[3]

What many ontologies have in common in both computer science and in philosophy is the representation of entities, ideas, and events, along with their properties and relations, according to a system of categories. In both fields, there is considerable work on problems of ontological relativity (e.g., Quine and Kripke in philosophy, Sowa and Guarino in computer science),[4] and debates concerning whether a normative ontology is viable (e.g., debates over foundationalism in philosophy, and over the Cyc project in AI). Differences between the two are largely matters of focus. Computer scientists are more concerned with establishing fixed, controlled vocabularies, while philosophers are more concerned in first principles, such as whether there are such things as fixed essences or whether entities must be ontologically more primary than processes.

Other fields make ontological assumptions that are sometimes explicitly elaborated and explored. For instance, the definition and ontology of economics (also sometimes called the political economy) is hotly debated especially in Marxist economics[5] where it is a primary concern, but also in other subfields.[6] Such concerns intersect with those of information science when a simulation or model is intended to enable decisions in the economic realm; for example, to determine what capital assets are at risk and if so by how much (see risk management). Some claim all social sciences have explicit ontology issues because they do not have hard falsifiability criteria like most models in physical sciences and that indeed the lack of such widely accepted hard falsification criteria is what defines a social or soft science.[citation needed]

History[edit] Historically, ontologies arise out of the branch of philosophy known as metaphysics, which deals with the nature of reality – of what exists. This fundamental branch is concerned with analyzing various types or modes of existence, often with special attention to the relations between particulars and universals, between intrinsic and extrinsic properties, and between essence and existence. The traditional goal of ontological inquiry in particular is to divide the world "at its joints" to discover those fundamental categories or kinds into which the world’s objects naturally fall.[7]

During the second half of the 20th century, philosophers extensively debated the possible methods or approaches to building ontologies without actually building any very elaborate ontologies themselves. By contrast, computer scientists were building some large and robust ontologies, such as WordNet and Cyc, with comparatively little debate over how they were built.

Since the mid-1970s, researchers in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) have recognized that capturing knowledge is the key to building large and powerful AI systems. AI researchers argued that they could create new ontologies as computational models that enable certain kinds of automated reasoning. In the 1980s, the AI community began to use the term ontology to refer to both a theory of a modeled world and a component of knowledge systems. Some researchers, drawing inspiration from philosophical ontologies, viewed computational ontology as a kind of applied philosophy.[8]

In the early 1990s, the widely cited Web page and paper "Toward Principles for the Design of Ontologies Used for Knowledge Sharing" by Tom Gruber[9] is credited with a deliberate definition of ontology as a technical term in computer science. Gruber introduced the term to mean a specification of a conceptualization:

An ontology is a description (like a formal specification of a program) of the concepts and relationships that can formally exist for an agent or a community of agents. This definition is consistent with the usage of ontology as set of concept definitions, but more general. And it is a different sense of the word than its use in philosophy.[10]

According to Gruber (1993):

Ontologies are often equated with taxonomic hierarchies of classes, class definitions, and the subsumption relation, but ontologies need not be limited to these forms. Ontologies are also not limited to conservative definitions — that is, definitions in the traditional logic sense that only introduce terminology and do not add any knowledge about the world.[11] To specify a conceptualization, one needs to state axioms that do constrain the possible interpretations for the defined terms.[1]

Components[edit] Main article: Ontology components Contemporary ontologies share many structural similarities, regardless of the language in which they are expressed. As mentioned above, most ontologies describe individuals (instances), classes (concepts), attributes, and relations. In this section each of these components is discussed in turn.

Common components of ontologies include:

Individuals: instances or objects (the basic or "ground level" objects) Classes: sets, collections, concepts, classes in programming, types of objects, or kinds of things Attributes: aspects, properties, features, characteristics, or parameters that objects (and classes) can have Relations: ways in which classes and individuals can be related to one another Function terms: complex structures formed from certain relations that can be used in place of an individual term in a statement Restrictions: formally stated descriptions of what must be true in order for some assertion to be accepted as input Rules: statements in the form of an if-then (antecedent-consequent) sentence that describe the logical inferences that can be drawn from an assertion in a particular form Axioms: assertions (including rules) in a logical form that together comprise the overall theory that the ontology describes in its domain of application. This definition differs from that of "axioms" in generative grammar and formal logic. In those disciplines, axioms include only statements asserted as a priori knowledge. As used here, "axioms" also include the theory derived from axiomatic statements Events: the changing of attributes or relations Ontologies are commonly encoded using ontology languages.

Types[edit] Domain ontology[edit] A domain ontology (or domain-specific ontology) represents concepts which belong to part of the world. Particular meanings of terms applied to that domain are provided by domain ontology. For example the word card has many different meanings. An ontology about the domain of poker would model the "playing card" meaning of the word, while an ontology about the domain of computer hardware would model the "punched card" and "video card" meanings.

Since domain ontologies represent concepts in very specific and often eclectic ways, they are often incompatible. As systems that rely on domain ontologies expand, they often need to merge domain ontologies into a more general representation. This presents a challenge to the ontology designer. Different ontologies in the same domain arise due to different languages, different intended usage of the ontologies, and different perceptions of the domain (based on cultural background, education, ideology, etc.).

At present, merging ontologies that are not developed from a common foundation ontology is a largely manual process and therefore time-consuming and expensive. Domain ontologies that use the same foundation ontology to provide a set of basic elements with which to specify the meanings of the domain ontology elements can be merged automatically. There are studies on generalized techniques for merging ontologies,[12] but this area of research is still largely theoretical.

Upper ontology[edit] Main article: Upper ontology An upper ontology (or foundation ontology) is a model of the common objects that are generally applicable across a wide range of domain ontologies. It usually employs a core glossary that contains the terms and associated object descriptions as they are used in various relevant domain sets.

There are several standardized upper ontologies available for use, including BFO, BORO method, Dublin Core, GFO, OpenCyc/ResearchCyc, SUMO, the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO),[13] and DOLCE.[14][15] WordNet, while considered an upper ontology by some, is not strictly an ontology. However, it has been employed as a linguistic tool for learning domain ontologies.[16]

Hybrid ontology[edit] The Gellish ontology is an example of a combination of an upper and a domain ontology.

Visualization[edit] A survey of ontology visualization techniques is presented by Katifori et al.[17] An evaluation of two most established ontology visualization techniques: indented tree and graph is discussed in.[18] A visual language for ontologies represented in OWL is specified by the Visual Notation for OWL Ontologies (VOWL).

Engineering[edit] Main article: Ontology engineering Ontology engineering (or ontology building) is a subfield of knowledge engineering. It studies the ontology development process, the ontology life cycle, the methods and methodologies for building ontologies, and the tool suites and languages that support them.[19][20]

Ontology engineering aims to make explicit the knowledge contained within software applications, and within enterprises and business procedures for a particular domain. Ontology engineering offers a direction towards solving the interoperability problems brought about by semantic obstacles, such as the obstacles related to the definitions of business terms and software classes. Ontology engineering is a set of tasks related to the development of ontologies for a particular domain.[21]