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Ontologies for Knowledge Sharing
To support the sharing and reuse of formally represented knowledge
among AI systems, it is useful to define the common vocabulary in
which shared knowledge is represented. A specification of a
representational vocabulary for a shared domain of discourse --
definitions of classes, relations, functions, and other objects -- is
called an ontology.
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Ontolingua
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- A. Farquhar, R. Fikes, & J. Rice. The
Ontolingua Server: A Tool for Collaborative Ontology
Construction. Knowledge Systems Laboratory, KSL-96-26, September
1996.
Reusable ontologies are becoming increasingly important for tasks such
as information integration, knowledge-level interoperation, and
knowledge-base development. We have developed a set of tools and
services to support the process of achieving consensus on common
shared ontologies by geographically distributed groups. These tools
make use of the world-wide web to enable wide access and provide users
with the ability to pub-lish, browse, create, and edit ontologies
stored on an ontology server. Users can quickly assemble a new
ontology from a library of modules. We discuss how our system was
constructed, how it exploits existing protocols and browsing tools,
and our experience supporting hundreds of users. We describe
applications using our tools to achieve con-sensus on ontologies and
to integrate information. The Ontolingua Server may be accessed
through the URL http://ontolingua.stanford.edu/.
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A Guided Tour to Developing Ontologies Using Ontolingua -- for
people who would like an introduction both to developing ontologies
and to using the Ontolingua Ontology Editor provided by the Stanford
KSL Network Services for creating and modifying ontologies.
- Stanford KSL
Network Services -- including an ontology editor.
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Papers
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- the
Stanford Knowledge Sharing paper repository
- What
is an Ontology? by Tom Gruber.
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Toward principles for the design of ontologies used for knowledge
sharing, T. R. Gruber, in Formal Ontology in Conceptual
Analysis and Knowledge Representation, Nicola Guarino and Roberto
Poli, editors, Kluwer Academic, in preparation. Original paper
presented at the International Workshop on Formal Ontology,
March 1993. Stanford Knowledge Systems Laboratory Report KSL-93-04.
Recent work in Artificial Intelligence 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. The rationale for selected design decisions in
these ontologies is presented. Alternative representations are
compared and evaluated against the general criteria. In particular,
the case studies illustrate the notions of encoding bias and
ontological overcommitment and suggest ways to avoid them in the
design of ontologies for knowledge sharing.
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