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Erschienen in:
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2009 | OriginalPaper | Buchkapitel

What Is an Ontology?

verfasst von : Nicola Guarino, Daniel Oberle, Steffen Staab

Erschienen in: Handbook on Ontologies

Verlag: Springer Berlin Heidelberg

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Summary

The word “ontology” is used with different senses in different communities. The most radical difference is perhaps between the philosophical sense, which has of course a well-established tradition, and the computational sense, which emerged in the recent years in the knowledge engineering community, starting from an early informal definition of (computational) ontologies as “explicit specifications of conceptualizations”. In this paper we shall revisit the previous attempts to clarify and formalize such original definition, providing a detailed account of the notions of conceptualization and explicit specification, while discussing at the same time the importance of shared explicit specifications.

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Nächstes Kapitel Description Logics
Fußnoten
1
The first books of Aristotle’s treatises, known collectively as “Organon,” deal with the nature of the world, i.e., physics. Metaphysics denotes the subjects dealt with in the rest of the books – among them Ontology. Philosophers sometimes equate Metaphysics and Ontology.
 
2
Note, that the term “Ontology” itself was coined only in the early seventeenth century [13].
 
3
Entity denotes the most general being, and, thus, subsumes subjects, objects, processes, ideas, etc.
 
4
Unfortunately, the terminology used in Computer Science is problematic here. What we call “concepts” in this chapter may be better called “properties” or “categories.” Regrettably, “property” is used to denote a binary relation in RDF(S), so we shall avoid using it. Also, Smith made us aware that the notion of “concept” is quite ambiguous [14]. A way to solve the terminological conflict is to adopt the philosophical term “universal,” which roughly denotes those entities that can have instances; particulars are entities that do not have instances. What we call “concepts” correspond to unary universals, while “relations” correspond to binary universals.
 
5
Other definitions of an ontology have surfaced in the literature, e.g., [16] or [11], which are similar to Gruber’s. However, the one from Gruber seems to be the most prevalent and most cited.
 
6
The name of a person could also be assigned via relations, e.g., firstname(I046758,‘Daniel’) and lastname(I046758,‘Oberle’).
 
7
To underly their link with conceptualizations, Guarino has proposed to call such intensional relations “conceptual relations” in [10].
 
8
It is important to note that, if we want to provide a well-founded, grounded account of meaning, this system needs to be first of all a physical system, and not an abstract entity.
 
9
Of course, properly speaking, it is an agent who commits to a conceptualization while using a certain language: what we call the language commitment is an account of the competent use of the language by an agent who adopts a certain conceptualization.
 
Literatur
1.
W. Borst. Construction of Engineering Ontologies. PhD thesis, Institute for Telematica and Information Technology, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands, 1997.
2.
R. Carnap. Meaning and Necessity – A Study in Semantics and Modal Logic. The University of Chicago Press, second edition, 1956.MATH
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S. K. Das. Deductive Databases and Logic Programming. Addison Wesley, 1992.
4.
D. R. Dowty, R. Wall, and S. Peters. Introduction to Montague Semantics, volume 11 of Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy. Springer, Heidelberg, 1980.CrossRef
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M. R. Genesereth and N. J. Nilsson. Logical Foundations of Artificial Intelligence. Morgan Kaufmann, Los Altos, CA, 1987.MATH
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T. R. Gruber. Towards principles for the design of ontologies used for knowledge sharing. In N. Guarino and R. Poli, editors, Formal Ontology in Conceptual Analysis and Knowledge Representation. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Deventer, The Netherlands, 1993.
7.
T. R. Gruber. A Translation Approach to Portable Ontologies. Knowledge Acquisition, 5(2):199–220, 1993.CrossRef
8.
T. R. Gruber. Toward Principles for the Design of Ontologies Used for Knowledge Sharing. International Journal of Human Computer Studies, 43(5–6):907–928, 1995.CrossRef
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N. Guarino and P. Giaretta. Ontologies and Knowledge Bases: Towards a Terminological Clarification. In N. Mars, editor, Towards Very Large Knowledge Bases: Knowledge Building and Knowledge Sharing, pages 25–32. IOS Press, Amsterdam, 1995.
10.
N. Guarino. Formal Ontology in Information Systems. In N. Guarino, editor, Formal Ontology in Information Systems. Proceedings of FOIS'98, Trento, Italy, June 6-8, 1998, pages 3–15. IOS Press, Amsterdam, 1998.
11.
J. Hendler. Agents and the Semantic Web. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 16(2):30–37, 2001.CrossRef
12.
C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards. The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism. Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., London, tenth edition, 1923.
13.
P. Øhrstrøm, J. Andersen, and H. Schärfe. What has happened to ontology. In F. Dau, M.-L. Mugnier, and G. Stumme, editors, Conceptual Structures: Common Semantics for Sharing Knowledge, 13th International Conference on Conceptual Structures, ICCS 2005, Kassel, Germany, July 17–22, 2005, Proceedings, volume 3596 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 425–438. Springer, Heidelberg, 2005.
14.
B. Smith. Beyond Concepts: Ontology as Reality Representation. In A. C. Varzi and L. Vieu, editors, Formal Ontology in Information Systems – Proceedings of the Third International Conference (FOIS 2004), pages 73–85. IOS Press, Amsterdam, 2004.
15.
R. Studer, R. Benjamins, and D. Fensel. Knowledge engineering: Principles and methods. Data & Knowledge Engineering, 25(1–2):161–198, 1998.CrossRefMATH
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W. Swartout and A. Tate. Ontologies. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 14(1):18–19, 1999.CrossRef
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M. Uschold. Ontologies and Semantics for Seamless Connectivity. SIGMOD Record, 33(4):58–64, 2004.CrossRef
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Metadaten
Titel
What Is an Ontology?
verfasst von
Nicola Guarino
Daniel Oberle
Steffen Staab
Copyright-Jahr
2009
Verlag
Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Buch
Handbook on Ontologies

Print ISBN: 978-3-540-70999-2

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-540-92673-3

Copyright-Jahr: 2009

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-92673-3_0