Re: "what is an ontology?" stuff in requirements abstract/intro

I also typically refer to Gruber's definition when I introduce ontologies -
I think citing his work is important.
When i introduce ontologies to people unfamiliar with our field, I also
think it is useful to mention that ontology has been around in the
philosophical literature for a long time and our definition departs from
theirs.
I also typically point to collections of work on ontologies, e.g., fois
books.

I wrote a paper on Ontologies Come of Age[1], which could be one of the
things pointed to if you like and of course it points to much previous work.

[1]
http://www.ksl.stanford.edu/people/dlm/papers/ontologies-come-of-age-abstract.html

d
Ludger van Elst wrote:

> Hi Webont-Members,
>
> > "what is an ontology?" stuff in requirements abstract/intro
> > From: Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org>
> ...
> > let's
> > see if there's some text to grab... yes:
> >
> >   Put simply, an ontology is just a set of
> >   standard vocabularly terms along with some
> >   formal definitions of the terms.
> >
> > Lightly edited:
> >
> >   An ontology is vocabularly of terms along
> >   with some formal definitions of the terms.
>
> I am a little bit surprised that - though nearly all papers about
> ontologies refer to Tom Gruber´s "shared conceptualization" definition -
> all proposals in this group only capture the "conceptualization" aspect
> but don´t mention the "sharing" aspect.
> In the requirements document there is a paragraph titled "3.1 Shared
> Ontologies" which would - accepting Tom's definition - expand to "3.1
> Shared Shared Conceptualizations".
> In my opinion, a good definition of the term ontology should cover both
> aspects, sharing and conceptualizing. Otherwise, we should consequently
> only talk about conceptualizations (e.g., "A conceptualization is
> vocabularly of terms along with some formal definitions of the terms."),
> not ontologies.
>
> What do you think about this topic?
>
> Best regards,
>  Ludger
>
> ______________________________________________________________________
> Ludger van Elst
> Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz GmbH
> Erwin-Schrödinger-Straße Geb. 57/377, D-67608 Kaiserslautern, Germany
> Tel.  : 0631 205-3474
> E-mail: elst@dfki.uni-kl.de
> WWW   : http://www.dfki.uni-kl.de/~elst/
> ______________________________________________________________________

--
 Deborah L. McGuinness
 Knowledge Systems Laboratory
 Gates Computer Science Building, 2A Room 241
 Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-9020
 email: dlm@ksl.stanford.edu
 URL: http://ksl.stanford.edu/people/dlm
 (voice) 650 723 9770    (stanford fax) 650 725 5850   (computer fax)  801
705 0941

Received on Thursday, 14 February 2002 08:43:02 UTC