Ontology (information science)
In information science, an ontology encompasses a representation, formal naming, and definitions of the categories, properties, and relations between the concepts, data, or entities that pertain to one, many, or all domains of discourse. More simply, an ontology is a way of showing the properties of a subject area and how they are related, by defining a set of terms and relational expressions that represent the entities in that subject area. The field which studies ontologies so conceived is sometimes referred to as applied ontology.[1]
Every academic discipline or field, in creating its terminology, thereby lays the groundwork for an ontology. Each uses ontological assumptions to frame explicit theories, research and applications. Improved ontologies may improve problem solving within that domain, interoperability of data systems, and discoverability of data. Translating research papers within every field is a problem made easier when experts from different countries maintain a controlled vocabulary of jargon between each of their languages.[2] For instance, the definition and ontology of economics is a primary concern in Marxist economics,[3] but also in other subfields of economics.[4] An example of economics relying on information science occurs in cases where a simulation or model is intended to enable economic decisions, such as determining what capital assets are at risk and by how much (see risk management).
What ontologies in both information science and philosophy have in common is the attempt to represent entities, including both objects and events, with all their interdependent properties and relations, according to a system of categories. In both fields, there is considerable work on problems of ontology engineering (e.g., Quine and Kripke in philosophy, Sowa and Guarino in information science),[5] and debates concerning to what extent normative ontology is possible (e.g., foundationalism and coherentism in philosophy, BFO and Cyc in artificial intelligence).
Applied ontology is considered by some as a successor to prior work in philosophy. However many current efforts are more concerned with establishing controlled vocabularies of narrow domains than with philosophical first principles, or with questions such as the mode of existence of fixed essences or whether enduring objects (e.g., perdurantism and endurantism) may be ontologically more primary than processes. Artificial intelligence has retained considerable attention regarding applied ontology in subfields like natural language processing within machine translation and knowledge representation, but ontology editors are being used often in a range of fields, including biomedical informatics,[6] industry.[7] Such efforts often use ontology editing tools such as Protégé.[8]
is a general logic-based specification language developed within the IFIP working group 1.3 "Foundations of System Specifications" and is a de facto standard language for software specifications. It is now being applied to ontology specifications in order to provide modularity and structuring mechanisms.
Common Algebraic Specification Language
is ISO standard 24707, a specification of a family of ontology languages that can be accurately translated into each other.
Common logic
The project has its own ontology language called CycL, based on first-order predicate calculus with some higher-order extensions.
Cyc
(Developing Ontology-Grounded Methods and Applications) adopts the fact-oriented modeling approach to provide a higher level of semantic stability.
DOGMA
The language includes rules for its own extension and thus integrates an ontology with an ontology language.
Gellish
is a syntax for first-order logic that is based on S-expressions. SUO-KIF is a derivative version supporting the Suggested Upper Merged Ontology.
KIF
is a category theoretic approach to ontologies, emphasizing translations between ontologies using functors.
Olog
a language used for biological and biomedical ontologies.
OBO
is an ontologically well-founded profile of UML for conceptual modeling of domain ontologies.
OntoUML
is a language for making ontological statements, developed as a follow-on from RDF and RDFS, as well as earlier ontology language projects including OIL, DAML, and DAML+OIL. OWL is intended to be used over the World Wide Web, and all its elements (classes, properties and individuals) are defined as RDF resources, and identified by URIs.
OWL
(Semantics of Business Vocabularies and Rules) is an OMG standard adopted in industry to build ontologies.
SBVR
TOronto Virtual Enterprise project
TOVE Project
An ontology language is a formal language used to encode an ontology. There are a number of such languages for ontologies, both proprietary and standards-based:
a linguistic ontology for Arabic, which can be used as an Arabic Wordnet but with ontologically-clean content.[36]
Arabic Ontology
AURUM - Information Security Ontology, An ontology for information security knowledge sharing, enabling users to collaboratively understand and extend the domain knowledge body. It may serve as a basis for automated information security risk and compliance management.
[37]
a very large multilingual semantic network and ontology, lexicalized in many languages
BabelNet
BioPAX, an ontology for the exchange and interoperability of biological pathway (cellular processes) data
[39]
BMO, an e-Business Model Ontology based on a review of enterprise ontologies and business model literature
[40]
SSBMO, a Strongly Sustainable Business Model Ontology based on a review of the systems based natural and social science literature (including business). Includes critique of and significant extensions to the Business Model Ontology (BMO).
[41]
CCO and GexKB, Application Ontologies (APO) that integrate diverse types of knowledge with the Cell Cycle Ontology (CCO) and the Gene Expression Knowledge Base (GexKB)
[42]
CContology (Customer Complaint Ontology), an e-business ontology to support online customer complaint management
[43]
COSMO, a Foundation Ontology (current version in OWL) that is designed to contain representations of all of the primitive concepts needed to logically specify the meanings of any domain entity. It is intended to serve as a basic ontology that can be used to translate among the representations in other ontologies or databases. It started as a merger of the basic elements of the OpenCyc and SUMO ontologies, and has been supplemented with other ontology elements (types, relations) so as to include representations of all of the words in the Longman dictionary defining vocabulary.
[45]
an automatically generated ontology of research topics in the field of computer science
Computer Science Ontology
a large Foundation Ontology for formal representation of the universe of discourse
Cyc
,[46] designed to facilitate the mapping of diseases and associated conditions to particular medical codes
Disease Ontology
Drammar, ontology of drama
[47]
a simple ontology for documents and publishing
Dublin Core
Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO), a business conceptual ontology for the financial industry
[48]
Foundational, Core and Linguistic Ontologies
[49]
an ontology for describing persons, their activities and their relations to other people and objects
Friend of a Friend
an ontology that includes a dictionary and taxonomy that includes an upper ontology and a lower ontology that focusses on industrial and business applications in engineering, technology and procurement.
Gellish English dictionary
an ontology describing geopolitical information created by Food and Agriculture Organization(FAO). The geopolitical ontology includes names in multiple languages (English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, Russian and Italian); maps standard coding systems (UN, ISO, FAOSTAT, AGROVOC, etc.); provides relations among territories (land borders, group membership, etc.); and tracks historical changes. In addition, FAO provides web services of geopolitical ontology and a module maker to download modules of the geopolitical ontology into different formats (RDF, XML, and EXCEL). See more information at FAO Country Profiles.
Geopolitical ontology
GAO (General Automotive Ontology) - an ontology for the automotive industry that includes 'car' extensions
[51]
GUM (Generalized Upper Model), a linguistically motivated ontology for mediating between clients systems and natural language technology
[53]
,[54] a formal ontology for enterprise architecture being developed by the Australian, Canadian, UK and U.S. Defence Depts.
IDEAS Group
Linkbase, a formal representation of the biomedical domain, founded upon Basic Formal Ontology.
[55]
LPL, Landmark Pattern Language
[56]
NCBO Bioportal, biological and biomedical ontologies and associated tools to search, browse and visualise
[57]
Ontologies from the Neuroscience Information Framework: a modular set of ontologies for the neuroscience domain.
NIFSTD
OBO-Edit, an ontology browser for most of the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies
[58]
OMNIBUS Ontology, an ontology of learning, instruction, and instructional design
[60]
an open-access, integrated ontology of biological and clinical investigations
Ontology for Biomedical Investigations
ONSTR, Ontology for Newborn Screening Follow-up and Translational Research, Newborn Screening Follow-up Data Integration Collaborative, Emory University, Atlanta.
[61]
Plant Ontology for plant structures and growth/development stages, etc.
[62]
POPE, Purdue Ontology for Pharmaceutical Engineering
PRO, the Protein Ontology of the Protein Information Resource, Georgetown University
[63]
Program abstraction taxonomy
SCDO, the Sickle Cell Disease Ontology, facilitates data sharing and collaborations within the SDC community, amongst other applications (see list on SCDO website).
[67]
(Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine—Clinical Terms)
SNOMED CT
(SBO), for computational models in biology
Systems Biology Ontology
SWEET, Semantic Web for Earth and Environmental Terminology
[70]
SSN/SOSA, The Semantic Sensor Network Ontology (SSN) and Sensor, Observation, Sample, and Actuator Ontology (SOSA) are W3C Recommendation and OGC Standards for describing sensors and their observations.
[71]
ThoughtTreasure ontology
Topics for Indexing Medical Education
TIME-ITEM
a lightweight reference structure of 20,000 subject concept classes and their relationships derived from OpenCyc
UMBEL
a lexical reference system
WordNet
YAMATO, Yet Another More Advanced Top-level Ontology
[73]
YSO - General Finnish Ontology
The W3C Linking Open Data community project coordinates attempts to converge different ontologies into worldwide Semantic Web.
COLORE is an open repository of first-order ontologies in Common Logic with formal links between ontologies in the repository.
[74]
DAML Ontology Library maintains a legacy of ontologies in DAML.
[75]
Ontology Design Patterns portal is a wiki repository of reusable components and practices for ontology design, and also maintains a list of exemplary ontologies.
[76]
Protégé Ontology Library contains a set of OWL, Frame-based and other format ontologies.
[77]
SchemaWeb is a directory of RDF schemata expressed in RDFS, OWL and DAML+OIL.
[78]
The development of ontologies has led to the emergence of services providing lists or directories of ontologies called ontology libraries.
The following are libraries of human-selected ontologies.
The following are both directories and search engines.
Enterprise applications. A more concrete example is SAPPHIRE (Health care) or Situational Awareness and Preparedness for Public Health Incidences and Reasoning Engines which is a semantics-based health information system capable of tracking and evaluating situations and occurrences that may affect public health.
[86]
bring together data from different sources and benefit therefore from ontological metadata which helps to connect the semantics of the data.[87]
Geographic information systems
Domain-specific ontologies are extremely important in biomedical research, which requires named entity disambiguation of various biomedical terms and abbreviations that have the same string of characters but represent different biomedical concepts. For example, CSF can represent Colony Stimulating Factor or Cerebral Spinal Fluid, both of which are represented by the same term, CSF, in biomedical literature. This is why a large number of public ontologies are related to the life sciences. Life science data science tools that fail to implement these types of biomedical ontologies will not be able to accurately determine causal relationships between concepts.[89]
[88]
In general, ontologies can be used beneficially in several fields.
Alphabet of human thought
Characteristica universalis
Interoperability
Level of measurement
Metalanguage
Natural semantic metalanguage
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Knowledge Representation at Open Directory Project
Library of ontologies
using Ontologies for searching
GoPubMed
(a.k.a. "Ontolog Forum") - an Open, International, Virtual Community of Practice on Ontology, Ontological Engineering and Semantic Technology
ONTOLOG
Use of Ontologies in Natural Language Processing
- an annual series of events (first started in 2006) that involves the ontology community and communities related to each year's theme chosen for the summit.