Ontologies for information management: balancing formality, stability, and sharing scope (original) (raw)

Ontology-Related Services in Agent-Based Distributed Information Infrastructures

2001

Ontologies are an emerging paradigm to support declarativity, interoperability, and intelligent services in many areas, such as Agent-based Computation, Distributed Information Systems, and Expert Systems. In the context of designing a scalable, agent-based middleware for the realization of distributed Organizational Memories (OM), we examine the question what ontology-related services must be provided as middleware components. To this end, we discuss three basic dimensions of information that have fundamental impact on the usefulness of ontologies for OMs, namely formality, stability, and sharing scope of information. A short discussion of techniques which are suited to find a balance in each of these dimensions leads to a characterization of roles of ontology-related actors in the OM scenario. We describe the several roles with respect to their goals, knowledge, competencies, rights, and obligations. These actor classes and the related competencies are candidates to define agent types, speech acts, and standard services in the envisioned OM middleware.

Ontologies: State of the Art, Business Potential, and Grand Challenges

Computing for Human Experience, 2008

In this chapter, we give an overview of what ontologies are and how they can be used. We discuss the impact of the expressiveness, the number of domain elements, the community size, the conceptual dynamics, and other variables on the feasibility of an ontology project. Then, we break down the general promise of ontologies of facilitating the exchange and usage of knowledge to six distinct technical advancements that ontologies actually provide, and discuss how this should influence design choices in ontology projects. Finally, we summarize the main challenges of ontology management in real-world applications, and explain which expectations from practitioners can be met as of today.

Toward principles for the design of ontologies used for knowledge sharing?

International Journal of Human-computer Studies / International Journal of Man-machine Studies, 1995

Recent work in Artificial Intelligence (AI) is exploring the use of formal ontologies as a way of specifying content-specific agreements for the sharing and reuse of knowledge among software entities. We take an engineering perspective on the development of such ontologies. Formal ontologies are viewed as designed artifacts, formulated for specific purposes and evaluated against objective design criteria. We describe the role of ontologies in supporting knowledge sharing activities, and then present a set of criteria to guide the development of ontologies for these purposes. We show how these criteria are applied in case studies from the design of ontologies for engineering mathematics and bibliographic data. Selected design decisions are discussed, and alternative representation choices are evaluated against the design criteria.

Ontologies for Knowledge Management: An Information Systems Perspective

Knowledge management research focuses on concepts, methods, and tools supporting the management of human knowledge. The main objective of this paper is to survey basic concepts that have been used in computer science for the representation of knowledge and summarize some of their advantages and drawbacks. A secondary objective is to relate these techniques to information science theory and practice.

Formal Ontology and Information Systems

1998

Research on ontology is becoming increasingly widespread in the computer science community, and its importance is being recognized in a multiplicity of research fields and application areas, including knowledge engineering, database design and integration, information retrieval and extraction. We shall use the generic term "information systems", in its broadest sense, to collectively refer to these application perspectives. We argue in this paper that so-called ontologies present their own methodological and architectural peculiarities: on the methodological side, their main peculiarity is the adoption of a highly interdisciplinary approach, while on the architectural side the most interesting aspect is the centrality of the role they can play in an information system, leading to the perspective of ontology-driven information systems.

From information society to knowledge society: the ontology issue

CASYS '2001, Liège, Belgique, 2001

Information society, virtual enterprise, e-business rely more and more on communication and knowledge sharing between heterogeneous actors. But, no communication is possible, and all the more so no co-operation or collaboration, if those actors do not share the same or at least a compatible meaning for the terms they use. Ontology 7 , understood as an agreed vocabulary of common terms and meanings, is a solution to that problem. Nevertheless, although there is quite a lot of experience in using ontologies, several barriers remain which stand against a real use of ontology. As a matter of fact, it is very difficult to build, reuse and share ontologies. We claim that the ontology problem requires a multidisciplinary approach based on sound epistemological, logical and linguistic principles. This article presents the Ontological Knowledge Station (OK Station®), a software environment for building and using ontologies which relies on such principles. The OK Station is currently being used in several industrial applications.

An ontology model to facilitate knowledge-sharing in multi-agent systems

The Knowledge Engineering Review, 2002

This article presents and motivates an extended ontology knowledge model which represents explicitly semantic information about concepts. This knowledge model results from enriching the standard conceptual model with semantic information which precisely characterises the concept's properties and expected ambiguities, including which properties are prototypical of a concept and which are exceptional, the behaviour of properties over time and the degree of applicability of properties to subconcepts. This enriched conceptual model permits a precise characterisation of what is represented by class membership mechanisms and helps knowledge engineers to determine, in a straightforward manner, the meta-properties holding for a concept. Meta-properties are recognised to be the main tool for a formal ontological analysis that allows us to build ontologies with a clean and untangled taxonomic structure.This enriched semantics can prove useful to describe what is known by agents in a multi...