2009 HandbookOnOntologies

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Subject Headings: Edited Volume, Ontology. Conceptual Modeling; Information System; Intelligent System; Ontology; Semantic Web.

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Product Description

An ontology is a formal description of concepts and relationships that can exist for a community of human and/or machine agents. The notion of ontologies is crucial for the purpose of enabling knowledge sharing and reuse. The Handbook on Ontologies provides a comprehensive overview of the current status and future prospectives of the field of ontologies considering ontology languages, ontology engineering methods, example ontologies, infrastructures and technologies for ontologies, and how to bring this all into ontology-based infrastructures and applications that are among the best of their kind. The field of ontologies has tremendously developed and grown in the five years since the first edition of the "Handbook on Ontologies". Therefore, its revision includes 21 completely new chapters as well as a major re-working of 15 chapters transferred to this second edition.

Preface

... ‘Ontology’ is still a rather overloaded term that is used with a lot of different meanings. This handbook does not consider the philosophical notion of an ‘ontology’ as addressed in philosophy for more than two thousand years by investigating questions like “what exists?”. It rather approaches the notion of ontologies from a Computer Science point of view. In Computer Science, ontologies started to become a relevant notion in the nineties of the last century, mostly related to work in Knowledge Acquisition at that time. In this context the basic definition of an ontology was coined as follows: “An ontology is an explicit specification of a conceptualization” (cf. [2]). I. e. an ontology provides a specification of a conceptualization of generic notions like time and space or of an application domain like knowledge management or life sciences. Starting from this initial definition, various characterizations of ontologies have been developed resulting in the following and nowadays most frequently seen definition: “An ontology is a formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualization” (cf. [6]). ‘Explicit’ refers to the fact that all elements of an ontology are explicitly defined, whereas ‘formal’ means that the ontology specification is given in a language that comes with a formal syntax and semantics, thus resulting in machine executable and machine interpretable ontology descriptions. Finally, ‘shared’ captures the aspect that an ontology is representing consensual knowledge that has been agreed on by a group of people, typically as a result of a social process.

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 AuthorvolumeDate ValuetitletypejournaltitleUrldoinoteyear
2009 HandbookOnOntologiesSteffen Staab
Rudi Studer
Handbook on Ontologies (2nd edition)http://books.google.com/books?id=W6ZNcAolVbwC