7. Structural Models of Knowledge Representation

Constructing so-called ontologies (Although there is an analogy between the notion of ontology in computer science and the notion of ontology in philosophy, we should differentiate between the two notions. In philosophy ontology is the study of being, its essential properties and its ultimate reasons.) is one of the main goals of applying structural models of knowledge representation, which have been introduced in Sect. 2.​4. In Artificial Intelligence and in computer science, an ontology (The system Cyc, which is developed by D. Lenat, is one of the biggest AI systems based on an ontology-based approach.) is defined as a formal specification (conceptualization) of a certain (application) domain which is defined in such a way that it can be used for solving various problems (in the scope of this domain) with the help of general reasoning methods (Such standard reasoning methods are analogous to a universal reasoning scheme, which is discussed in a previous chapter.). Such a specification is of the structural form. It can be treated as a kind of encyclopedia for the domain which contains descriptions of notions, objects, relations between them, etc.