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#ontology
3 More C's Of Ontology Engineering In The Enterprise
Keep control of your enterprise ontology
When designing a traditional architecture with a relational database near or at the bottom of your tech stack, the relational model is constructed to perfectly deliver the requirements and use-cases of the target system. Control is retained within the realms of the organisation…
Decouple your internal ontology from what you publish
The fact that your internal architecture has been built upon a rich cohesive ontology that fits your requirements, and provides for robust and easy to maintain enterprise software need not determine (or compromise!) what you want to publish to any given consumer. Marking up…
About Taxonomies & Controlled Vocabularies
An ontology is a richer thesaurus
An ontology, like a thesaurus, is a kind of taxonomy with structure and specific types of relationships between terms. In an ontology the types of relationships are greater in number and more specific in their function. Relationships could include, for example, located in to…
An Example Of Ontology Driven Software Engineering
SNaP ontologies and rNews
What about rNews and Schema.org ? A semantic publishing architecture based on full-blown RDF and the SNaP ontologies is by no means mutually exclusive with rNews, schema.org micro data or any other schemas for that matter (in fact the SNaP ontologies already inherit from many…
Disambiguation by ontological proximity
Ontological proximity disambiguates entities in the text by looking at relationships between entities that have been matched in the gazetteers. Entities that have a close ontological relationship are deemed to be more likely to be correct. For example, if analysis of a given…
Annotationproperty Vs. Dataproperty - Answers
AnnotationProperty versus DatatypeProperty in OWL DL
DatatypeProperty and AnnotationProperty are not the same, especially in OWL (2) DL. In OWL (2) DL, terms defined in an ontology are separated into classes, datatypes, object properties, datatype properties, annotation properties, instances and data values. An ObjectProperty…
Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart)
The ontology of the digital
There is a strange relationship between digital ideology and the metaphysical belief that our brains also run as computations. It is as if one belief justifies the other. It would indeed be very convenient for Google if it turns out that creating artificial intelligence is just…
Computations are not like gravity
“Historically, significant scientific progress has commonly been achieved in the absence of formal definitions. For instance, the phenomenological laws of electrical current flow were formulated by Ohm, Ampere, and Volta well before the discovery of the electron in 1892 by…
Computers don't really compute
On a deeper level, which we might call the ontological level, the distinction between analog and digital disappears, as both concepts like “analog” and “digital” are ultimately epistemic tools humans have invented to describe natural and man-made signals. On a computer chip the…
Is mathematics discovered or invented?
Penrose believes that math is precise while the physical world is approximate; Dehaene believes that math is an approximation of the physical world. Penrose believes that the universe is mathematically comprehensible and fundamentally mathematical, and further that mathematics…
Searle against functionalism
John Searle’s examination of social ontology. A professor of philosophy at University of California, Berkeley, Searle specializes in consciousness, philosophy of language, and what he calls “social facts.” For example, what kinds of things are corporations and money? They exist…
Observer-independent and observer-relative facts
Searle makes a distinction between observer-independent features and observer-relative features. Observer-independent features are things like gravity, mass, chemical bonds,48 the solar system, and mountains. These things exist even in the absence of human minds…
Ontologically subjective yet epistemically objective
Searle states, “Observer relativity implies ontological subjectivity but ontological subjectivity does not preclude epistemic objectivity.” To translate this into English: the existence of things that exist only because we believe them to exist does not mean that these things…
Why the social sciences are possible
“We can have epistemically objective knowledge about money and elections even though the kinds of facts about which one has epistemically objective knowledge are themselves all ontologically subjective.” He points out that if epistemic objectivity did require ontological…
AI as building robots with economic theory
Whether or not the field of artificial intelligence deals with this foundational issue could be decisive for its project of building superintelligent machines. It turns on whether computations are ontologically objective versus epistemically objective. If computations are only…
Back pain is ontologically subjective
Kant argued that all the things we think of as being objects in the world are only objects in our heads. And, as Searle would say in more modern philosophical language, these things have an ontologically subjective mode of existence. Another example could be your back pain. It…
The physicalist starting point
Again, Searle lays out in very clear terms the basic issue about foundational ontology as it relates to consciousness: We know independently that the world consists entirely of physical particles in fields of force (or whatever the ultimately correct physics tell us are the…
Physicalism and how neurons create meaning
Physicalism in its most general form is the belief that the only things in the universe that are observer-independent are physical. This is also what ontological objectivity means: once again, what things in the Universe exist without human observers? Physicalism further…
The computational move
The real bone of contention between computationalists and others is whether to include computations in the list of observer-independent phenomena. Are computation and information like mass or the elementary particles? Or more dramatically, are computations even more fundamental…
Computations have no ontological status
Manzotti suggests that there is actually no such thing as information. Therefore, neither machines nor biologically based nervous systems can process it more efficiently—because information may not refer to anything. He argues that the computational level may be removed from…
LSD reveals consciousness as part of the universe
Hofmann thought LSD could do is allow us to become aware of the ontologically objective existence of consciousness as part of the universe.
Boro Method (wikipedia Contributors)
The BORO method takes an extensional approach to ontology development
The BORO method is a simple, repeatable process for developing formal ontologies. The method takes an extensional approach to ontology development. The advantage of BORO over other methods is that its grounding in physical reality means that, if followed to the letter, the…
Boro is particularly good at semantic analysis
Although BORO produces an ontology (information science) in the very strictest sense of the term, it does not produce the type of ontology (information science) that computer scientists would use for reasoning and inference. Instead, BORO's purpose is to improve the quality of…
BORO: mining ontologies from legacy systems
BORO is an approach to developing ontological or semantic models for large complex operational applications that consists of a top ontology and a process for constructing the ontology. It was originally developed as a method for mining ontologies from multiple legacy systems –…
Csog Home Page
Scientific ontology and social ontology
A motivating belief is that there is much to be gained not only from the determination of new social categories, where appropriate, but also from the systematic study and elaboration of such familiar categories as process, change, difference, gender, race, space, time, law…
Digital Hhermeneutics
Digital ontology
Digital hermeneutics is based on digital ontology, a concept that Michael Eldred (2001) and the author developed some years ago (Capurro 2001). What is digital ontology? Eldred writes: As long as we remain 'embedded' unquestioningly in the digital casting, everything is…
Dynamic Semantic Publishing
Separating meaning from content
Most content management systems (CMS) in use today separate content from the presentation of web pages to make content more manageable and publishing more flexible. They do this with varying degrees of success depending on whether the CMS uses a page model or more of an object…
Formal Ontology
Formal ontology
In philosophy, the term formal ontology is used to refer to an ontology defined by axioms in a formal language with the goal to provide an unbiased (domain- and application-independent) view on reality, which can help the modeler of domain- or application-specific ontologies…
Applications of upper level ontologies
Formal ontology as a template to create novel specific domain ontologies Having a formal ontology at your disposal, especially when it consists of a Formal upper layer enriched with concrete domain-independent 'middle layer' concepts, can really aid the creation of a domain…
From Encyclopedia To Ontology: Toward Dynamic Representation Of The Discipline Of Philosophy
No multi-inheritance; usage of 'semantic cross-links' instead
Another issue is that some concepts and individuals may not naturally belong in a single unique location in the ontology, being multiply classified by experts and/or auto- mated methods. While most ontology languages permit multiple inheritance, rampant multiple classification…
Computational ontologies and knowledge bases
We take a computational ontology to be a directed acyclic graph where nodes represent concepts and the links between concepts represent the taxonomic “isa” relation (e.g. in the graph where ‘Wine → Red Wine → Brunello di Montalcino, everything that “is a” instance of Brunello…
Three pieces of accepted wisdom when modeling ontologies
(1) There is no one correct way to model a domain-there are always viable alternatives. The best solution almost always depends on the application that you have in mind and the extensions that you anticipate. (2) Ontology development is necessarily an iterative process. (3)…
Problem: how to differentiate categories from individuals? a sep-driven approximation..
Another important aspect of ontology design concerns the drawing of a line between categories and individuals. For instance, should connectionism be considered an instance of the category philosophy of articial intelligence, or should it be treated as a subcategory with…
What a domain ontology is for
The purpose of such an ontology is to assist humans and automatic agents in understanding the contents of the domain (especially in terms of properties, relations, and subsumption/inheritance relationships which hold between the domain’s types) and to allow data generated in…
The challenges of knowledge modelers: rigor, expertise, obsolescence
In the design, implementation, and long-term deployment of computational ontologies, knowledge modelers face several enduring challenges. For one, computational ontologies have often been designed without sufficient logical rigor, which may come with pragmatic costs in terms of…
Methodological criticism: inpho is not a hierarchy of being
The first line of criticism comes from those who believe the word ‘ontology’ has been stretched too far from its original metaphysical roots, feeling that it is more misleading than useful when referring to a formal data representation rather than an actual hierarchy of being…
Computational ontology vs formal ontology
Our approach to representing the discipline derives from what computer and information scientists call “formal ontology.” However, we will avoid using this term because some researchers sensitive to Husserl’s distinction between “formal ontology” and “material ontology” prefer…
Possible answer to criticism: introduction of a 'conditional', context-dependent is-a relation (mikele: not really a solution)
We concede this last point; the classifications under the idea category will likely not hold domain-generally. For these divisions, we propose that the isa relation be under- stood to express conditional subsumption: A isa B, but only in the context of C, ..., Z, B’s ancestors…
Statis vs dynamic ontology
One broad response to these challenges [of knowledge modeling], emphasized by the “formal ontologists,” is to attempt to produce a “once and for all” description of the underlying reality of the subject domains, and to link the types of those subject domains into a standardized…
Challenge: will the dynamic nature of the ontology be able to capture paradigm shifts in philosophy?
There seems to be no way around the conclusion that large-scale paradigm shifts in philosophy will require fresh re-conceptualizations of the Þeld from the top down. Rather than being fatalistic, however, we can note the advantages of the 'dynamic ontology' approach to these…
Handbook Of Knowledge Representation
Ontologies versus data models
The difference between ontologies and data models does not lie in the language being used: you can define an ontology in a basic ER language (although you will be hampered in what you can say); similarly, you can write a data model with OWL. Writing something in OWL does not…
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How ontologies differ from other information models
RDFS and OWL are languages with clearly defined semantics or mathematical basis for the meaning of each construct. Semantics are defined in terms of inferences each statement entails. Since concepts in RDFS and OWL ontologies are expressed formally, they can be processed by…
What an ontology provides
An ontology defines the concepts and relationships used to describe and represent an area of knowledge (subject matter). It provides: A vocabulary A shared language An ontology is defined using constructs for: Concepts: classes Relationships: properties (object and data) Rules…
Introducing Artificial Intelligence (Henry Brighton and Howard Selina)
A shared language emerging between agents
The aim of the experiment is to investigate how a shared language can emerge as a result of the interactions between agents. Crucially, nowhere in the experiment is language defined; it develops as a result of interactions between the agents. Starting with a blank slate, the…
Linked Data Is Merely More Data
An ontology for the Linked Data cloud
Some of the LoD Cloud shortcomings identified above can be resolved by providing a systematic and formal descrip- tion of the LoD Cloud. There is an apparent lack of an ontology which formalizes and systematically captures the information contained in LoD Cloud datasets. Such…
Metaclass (semantic Web) - Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia
Punning
In the Semantic Web, a metaclass is a class whose instances are classes. Metaclasses are supported in the ontology language OWL and the data-modeling vocabulary RDFS. Similar to their role in programming languages, metaclasses in Semantic Web languages can have properties…
Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle)
Observer-independent and observer-relative features
There are two distinctions that I want you to be clear about at the very beginning, because they are essential for the argument and because the failure to understand them has led to massive philosophical confusion. The first is the distinction between those features of a world…
Causal reduction without ontological reduction
On the dualist’s conception, consciousness is definitely something over and above its material substrate. Indeed the dualist supposes that the irreducibility of consciousness already implies that consciousness is something over and above its neurobiological base. I deny that…
The illusion of dualism
Once again it seems to me the illusion of dualism is generated by misunderstanding a very real distinction. There really is a distinction between those irreducible features of the world that have a first-person or subjective ontology and those that do not. But it is a deep…
Epistemic versus ontological subjectivity
The fact that conscious states are ontologically subjective, in the sense that they exist only as experienced by a human or animal subject, does not imply that there cannot be a scientifically objective study of conscious states. “Objective” and “subjective” are systematically…
Ontologies And Knowledge Bases: Towards A Terminological Clarification
General ontology vs regional ontology
Aristotle defined Ontology as the science of being as such: unlike the special sciences, each of which investigates a class of beings and their determinations, Ontology regards “all the species of being qua being and the attributes which belong to it qua being” (Aristotle…
Ontological theory vs conceptualization
...a possible confusion arises between an ontology intended as a particular conceptual framework at the semantic level (interpretations 2-3) and an ontology intended as a concrete artifact at the syntactic level, to be used for a given purpose (interpretations 4-7). This is an…
Ontology
Ontology between realism and nominalism
Ontology, in analytic philosophy, concerns the determining of whether some categories of being are fundamental and asks in what sense the items in those categories can be said to "be". It is the inquiry into being in so much as it is being, or into beings insofar as they…
Logic plus ontology makes a language
The subject of ontology is the study of the categories of things that exist or may exist in some domain. The product of such a study, called an ontology, is a catalog of the types of things that are assumed to exist in a domain of interest D from the perspective of a person who…
Ontology And The Art Of Not Designing | In Context
Ontology is an exercise in detection not creation
Requirements have no effect on meaning. Concepts are unaffected by whether or not you choose to include them in an application. If a given concept is that of a relative thing then that is the only thing it can mean; if you need to stand it up in an ontology at all, you need to…
Ontology Maturing With Lightweight Collaborative Ontology Editing Tools
ontology engineering methods have neglected the early phase of ontology building where a conceptualization only exists rather informally
...ontology engineering methods have so far neglected the early phase of ontology building where a conceptualization only exists rather informally and undergoes continuous evolution through collaboration and interaction within the community ... current research and development…
Ontology building as a maturing process
Based on the knowledge maturing process introduced in [Sch05], we have to view ontology building as a maturing process (see fig. 1). It starts with some emerging ideas of the individual without having a clear or even shared terminology, communicated only informally. These vague…
Ontology building should be embedded in daily work
....we have to acknowledge that ontology building is not the primary activity of knowledge workers but that vocabularies emerge in their daily work implicitly. Thus, we need to integrate work processes with ontology building processes. ... Building ontologies must be integrated…
Ontology Views For Collaborative Ontology Development
Personal views of a shared ontology
...we propose making a web- accessible system (a Grid portal) that maintains a single centrally-held XML document containing the ontology for which all users in a specified group will have access and editing rights. The system will provide each user with their own view of the…
Ontology views and segmentation
..the ontology view might be the set of terms and definitions within a certain radius of a selected term, a set which does not itself constitute an ontology but a connected sub-graph (Noy, 2004; Voltz, 2003). The term ‘ontology segmentation’ has been coined to describe the…
Pluralism (philosophy) - Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia
Ontological pluralism
Ludwig Wittgenstein's notion of language-games argues that there is no over-arching, single, fundamental ontology, but only a patchwork of overlapping interconnected ontologies ineluctably leading from one to another. For example, Wittgenstein discusses 'number' as technical…
Semantic Web For The Humanities
Contextual knowledge in the humanities
Humanities ontologies require dynamic concept formalizations instead of static ones, especially for contested, open-textured or ambiguous concepts. The definition of such concepts needs to be dynamically built depending on their contexts. Examples of contextual knowledge are…
Semantic Web Gets Closer To The Internet Of Things - Dataversity
Sw and the internet of things
An ontology for the Internet of Things provides all the necessary semantics for the specification of IoT devices as well as the specifications of the IoT solution (input, output, control logic) that is deployed using these devices. These semantics include terminology related to…
Switching Partners: Dancing With The Ontological Engineers
"ontology" - a definition
"Ontology" is a term increasingly used in all areas of computer and information science to denote, roughly, a hierarchically organized classification system associated with a controlled, structured vocabulary that is designed to serve the retrieval and integration of data. An…
Ten Pitfalls Of Enterprise Ontology Management
Ontologies and xml
You can use ontologies as a central location to store the semantics or meaning of the data elements that live on the leaves of XML documents. When they are stored in a well-controlled centralized corporate ontology the definitions of the data elements go beyond the needs of a…
Importance of stable upper ontologies
Computer systems that have similar upper ontologies will have much lower integration costs. If upper ontologies are stable then people will develop trust in the systems. They are the anchors of your semantics and the foundation of your building. Change them frequently and you…
Shared meaning comes through shared trust
Just as a word processor helps you write a single document;; document management systems help you organize multiple documents. In the same light, you will need some simple tools and processes to manage the data elements in your corporate ontology as they grow from a single OWL…
The Cidoc Conceptual Reference Module: An Ontological Approach To Semantic Interoperability Of Metadata
The CRM's classes as a top-level framework
Only classes were introduced in the CRM that are domains or ranges for the relevant relationships, such that any other ontological refinement of the classes can be done as additional “terminological distinction” without interfering with the system of relationships. Such a…
Ontologies should grow monotonically
Gruber writes: “An ontology…should offer a conceptual foundation for a range of anticipated tasks, and the representation should be crafted so that one can extend and specialize the ontology monotonically”, i.e. without revision of the existing definitions. Only if this holds…
The Need For Research Maps To Navigate Published Work And Inform Experiment Planning
Strategies for nanopublications: publication process
The third strategy for building research maps builds nanopublications into the existing publication process. Different approaches could be taken toward imple- menting this strategy. For example, Microsoft has developed a plugin that as- sists authors in using ontologies to…
Three C’s Of Ontology Engineering
Don't bind internal systems to public ontologies
if the Acme Company data architect models his domain using purely public domain ontologies he is enforcing an early and tightly bound contract of his internal systems (APIs and their underlying SPARQL queries) to them. If he models people and relationships using pure FOAF then…
Choosing what to model in an ontology
There is clearly a grey area in choosing at what level you should start modelling an abstraction layer in your ontology. This line should be drawn at the point at which the things you are modelling fall into your domain - i.e. the boundary (contract) at which your internal…
Reusing public ontologies makes RDF interpretable
the use of existing public domain ontologies in one’s own ontology allows us to publish RDF such that external consumers (machines or humans) will already know how to interpret and use the knowledge described therein.
Two Misconceptions About The Semantic Web
One ontology to rule them all
To my knowledge, nobody has ever claimed that there should be “one ontology to rule them all.” Instead, what is regularly promoted is ontology reuse and/or integration. For example, the FOAF ontology is widely used in the semantic web to describe persons; why create your own…
Ubiseditor 3.0: Collaborative Ontology Development On The Web
Transaction managemen
Transaction management One important task is the implementation of a transaction management to avoid problems when multiple users edit the ontologies and commit their changes simul- taneously. However, since our system stores the different ontologies in a database back end, the…
Ontology segmentation
Ontology segmentation or the creation of ontology views is an important issue. Since many ontologies constantly grow in size and are therefore more and more difficult to understand, maintain and edit, ontology segmentation shall help to extract only those parts of a large…
Webprotégé : A Collaborative Ontology Editor And Knowledge Acquisition Tool For The Web
WebProtégé's collaboration features
WebProtégé provides extensive collaboration support, including change tracking, contextualized threaded discussions, watches and notifications, an extensible access policy mechanism, and generation of statistics of the ontology-development process [...] All authoring operations…
What Are The Differences Between A Vocabulary, A Taxonomy, A Thesaurus, An Ontology, And A Meta-model?
Meta-models and ontologies
A meta-model is an explicit model of the constructs and rules needed to build specific models within a domain of interest. A valid meta-model is an ontology, but not all ontologies are modeled explicitly as meta-models. A meta-model can be viewed from three different…
What Is An Ontology?
Ontology as a specification of a conceptualization
In the context of knowledge sharing, I use the term ontology to mean a specification of a conceptualization. That is, an ontology is a description (like a formal specification of a program) of the concepts and relationships that can exist for an agent or a community of agents…
Ontological commitment
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…
Where Are The Semantics In The Semantic Web?
Discovering what another agent means
The moment we accept the problem and grant that agents may not use the same terms to mean the same things, we need a way for an agent to discover what another agent means when it communicates. In order for this to happen, every agent will need to publicly declare exactly what…
Problem of term heterogeneity and different modeling styles
Even if we assume a shared language and compatible conceptualizations, it is still possible, indeed likely, that different people will build different ontologies for the same domain. Two different terms may have the same meaning and the same term may have two different…
Agents must publicly declare their ontologies
The moment we accept the problem and grant that agents may not use the same terms to mean the same things, we need a way for an agent to discover what another agent means when it communicates. In order for this to happen, every agent will need to publicly declare exactly what…