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Onto – What?. By Cartic Ramakrishnan. What are ontologies?. The Oxford English dictionary says Ontologies are:. a branch of metaphysics the science of being the nature of existence and the categorical structure of reality. Tom Gruber’s definition.
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Onto – What? By Cartic Ramakrishnan
The Oxford English dictionary says Ontologies are: • a branch of metaphysics • the science of being • the nature of existence and the categorical structure of reality
Tom Gruber’s definition • An ontology is an explicit specification of a conceptualization. • The term is borrowed from philosophy, where an Ontology is a systematic account of Existence. • For Artificial Intelligence systems what exists is that which can be represented. • When the knowledge of a domain is represented in a declarative formalism, the set of objects that can be represented is called the universe of discourse. • Those set of objects, and the describable relationship among them, are reflected in the representational vocabulary with which a knowledge-base program represents knowledge.
John F. Sowa’s definition • An informal ontology may be specified by a catalog of types that are either undefined or defined only by statements in a natural language. • A formal ontology is specified by a collection of names for concept and relation types organized in a partial ordering by the type-subtype relation. • Formal ontologies are further distinguished by the way the subtypes are distinguished from their super-types: • Axiomatized ontology • Prototype-based ontology
Jeff Heflin’s formal definition of an Ontology • Given a logical language L, an ontology is a tuple <V, A>, where thevocabulary VSpis some subset of the predicate symbols of Land the axioms AWare a subset of the well-formed formulas of L.
Gruber – Ontological Commitments • We use common ontologies to describe ontological commitments for a set of agents so that they can communicate about a domain of discourse without necessarily operating on a globally shared theory. • We say that an agent commits to an ontology if its observable actions are consistent with the definitions in the ontology.
Knowledge Interchange Format Standard Ontologies
Algebra Ontology (defrelation binop (?f ?s) := (and (binary-function ?f) (subset (universe ?f) ?s))) (defrelation associative (?f ?s) := (forall (?x ?y ?z) (=> (member ?x ?s) (member ?y ?s) (member ?z ?s) (= (value ?f ?x (value ?f ?y ?z)) (value ?f (value ?f ?x ?y) ?z)))))
Past trends in database approaches • Inspired by needs and methods for RDB systems • Relational schemas are purely lexical • Obtained from conceptual schemas “flattened” into tables • Information loss relating to roles and concepts
Ontology based approach • Does not require the “flattening” into a single relation • More consensual view of knowledge • Reduces information loss
“World” Conceptual Schema Using Ontology for Semantics designer interpretation Any Design Tool domain expert Implementation ONTOLOGY agreement Information System (including the WWW) user Data
DOGMA • an ontology server in order to assist the gathering and incremental growth of ontologies • achieve at least a degree of scalability not possible with more complex representations • extensional approach