Fwd: Ontology definition

 *The Forwarding Message will be attached.*



---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Strassner John Charles" <johns@postech.ac.kr>
To: public-media-annotation@w3.org, johns@postech.ac.kr
Date: Mon, 26 Apr 2010 21:47:18 +0900 (KST)
Subject: Ontology definition
Hi team,

here is the definition of an ontology that I use when I teach. It is my
definition, so you are free to blame me. :-) This is from the following
reference:

J. Strassner, “*Knowledge Engineering Using Ontologies*”, Handbook of
Network and System Administration, edited by J. Bergstra and M. Burgess,
Chapter 3, Section 4, pages 425-457, ISBN 9780444521989

*An ontology is a formal, explicit specification of a shared,
machine-readable vocabulary and meanings, in the form of various entities
and relationships between them, to describe knowledge about the contents of
one or more related subject domains throughout the life cycle of its
existence. These entities and relationships are used to represent knowledge
in the set of related subject domains. Formal refers to the fact that the
ontology should be representable in a formal grammar. Explicit means that
the entities and relationships used, and the constraints on their use, are
precisely and unambiguously defined in a declarative language suitable for
knowledge representation. Shared means that all users of an ontology will
represent a concept using the same or equivalent set of entities and
relationships. Subject domain refers to the content of the universe of
discourse being represented by the ontology.*

Ontologies can be combined or related to each other using ontological
commitments as follows:

*An ontology commitment represents a selection of the best mapping between
the terms in an ontology and their meanings. Hence, ontologies can be
combined and/or related to each other by defining a set of mappings that
define precisely and unambiguously how one node in one ontology is related
to another node in another ontology.*



regards,
John



-- 
Soohong Daniel Park
Samsung Electronics, DMC R&D
http://sites.google.com/site/natpt00/home | Twitter@natpt