- From: William Grosso <grosso@SMI.Stanford.EDU>
- Date: Wed, 19 Apr 2000 14:53:57 -0700
- To: www-rdf-interest@w3.org
Mark Reitman wrote: > Ontology is the subject/department tree structure > that is often used by search engines to classify > content While this could be interpreted in a way that would make it seem true, it's not quite the last word on the subject. Knowledge Representation is a branch of Artificial Intelligence (which is itself a branch of Computer Science). The idea of using taxonomic representations (e.g., ontologies) to classify knowledge has been an active research area for the past 30 or so years (look under knowledge representation, for more explicitly ontological work, look under "Frame based languages"). Random index pages gleaned from a google search include http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/mfkb/related.html http://ksl-web.stanford.edu/kst/ontology-sources.html http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~franconi/kr.html Other starting points include: Peter Karp's _The Design Space of Knowledge Representation Systems_. It's a longish overview paper-- if you *start* here, you'll need to backtrack and look at some of the references. But it's a very good, unbiased overview of frame-based systems. And, personally, I've found that diving into the deep-end and then backtracking is a very efficient way to learn a subject. (http://www.ai.sri.com/~pkarp/frame-overview.html) _Readings in Knowledge Representation_. Published in the mid 1980's, by Morgan Kauffman and available in many CS libraries. Lots of good papers which are either "outdated" or "classics" depending on your taste. And, of course, a very good starting point, with a fair amount of discussion of using ontologies in medical applications, are the SMI web pages :-) An even better starting point might be Stefik's book _Introduction to Knowledge Systems_. While not about ontologies per se, it does cover all the background and important issues in knowledge representation (and thus makes the work on ontologies etcetera more comprehensible). Generally speaking, there isn't really a clear and sharp dividing line between the words "ontology" and "schema" (as in relational database schema). The boundary tends to be quite fuzzy. Thus, the areas where ontologies are used (or, at least, considered) in industry tend to be those that are either very knowledge-intensive or where database schemas get really complex-- healthcare, the recent wave of B2B companies doing vocabularies and mappings, aerospace companies, etcetera. -- William Grosso grosso@smi.stanford.edu Phone 650-498-4255 http://www.smi.stanford.edu/people/grosso/
Received on Wednesday, 19 April 2000 17:54:01 UTC