Ontologies

Introduction to Bio-Ontologies explores the computational background of ontologies. Emphasizing computational and algorithmic issues surrounding bio-ontologies, this self-contained text helps readers understand ontological algorithms and their applications.The first part of the book defines ontology and bio-ontologies. It also explains the importan

Ontology, or the nature of being, has been a focal area of study in the philosophical disciplines for a long time. Interpreted simply, the term ontology refers to the question what kinds of things exist? to a philosopher, while a computer scientist grapples with the question what kinds of things should we capture and represent? Together, research on the two questions yield a broad framework for the analysis of a discourse universe, its representation in some abstract form and the development of organizations and systems within the universe. The philosophical perspective on ontology provides a description of the essential properties and relations of all beings in the universe, while this notion has been expanded as well as specialized in the fields of computer science and artificial intelligence. The AI/CS communities now use this notion to refer to not one but multiple ontologies. In the AI/CS perspective, an ontology refers to the specification of knowledge about entities, and their relationships and interactions in a bounded universe of discourse only. As a result, a number of bounded-universe ontologies have been created over the last decade. These include the Chemicals ontology in the chemistry area, the TOVE and Enterprise ontologies for enterprise modeling, the REA ontology in the accounting area, organizational knowledge ontology in the knowledge management area, an ontology of air campaign planning in the defense area, and the GALEN ontology in the medical informatics area."

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.

An ontology is a description (like a formal specification of a program) of concepts and relationships that can exist for an agent or a community of agents. The concept is important 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. The handbook demonstrates standards that have been created recently, it surveys methods that have been developed and it shows how to bring both into practice of ontology infrastructures and applications that are the best of their kind.

An introduction to the field of applied ontology with examples derived particularly from biomedicine, covering theoretical components, design practices, and practical applications. In the era of “big data,” science is increasingly information driven, and the potential for computers to store, manage, and integrate massive amounts of data has given rise to such new disciplinary fields as biomedical informatics. Applied ontology offers a strategy for the organization of scientific information in computer-tractable form, drawing on concepts not only from computer and information science but also from linguistics, logic, and philosophy. This book provides an introduction to the field of applied ontology that is of particular relevance to biomedicine, covering theoretical components of ontologies, best practices for ontology design, and examples of biomedical ontologies in use. After defining an ontology as a representation of the types of entities in a given domain, the book distinguishes between different kinds of ontologies and taxonomies, and shows how applied ontology draws on more traditional ideas from metaphysics. It presents the core features of the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), now used by over one hundred ontology projects around the world, and offers examples of domain ontologies that utilize BFO. The book also describes Web Ontology Language (OWL), a common framework for Semantic Web technologies. Throughout, the book provides concrete recommendations for the design and construction of domain ontologies.

An ontology is a knowledge representation structure made up of concepts and their interrelations. It represents shared understanding delineated by some domain. The building of an ontology can be addressed from the perspective of natural language processing. This thesis discusses the validity and theoretical background of knowledge acquisition from natural language. It also presents the theoretical and experimental framework for NLP-driven ontology building and evaluation tasks.

The philosophical study of what exists and what it means for something to exist is one of the core concerns of metaphysics. This introduction to ontology provides readers with a comprehensive account of the central ideas of the subject of being. This book is divided into two parts. The first part explores questions of pure philosophical ontology: what is meant by the concept of being, why there exists something rather than nothing, and why there is only one logically contingent actual world. Dale Jacquette shows how logic provides the only possible answers to these fundamental problems. The second part of the book examines issues of applied scientific ontology. Jacquette offers a critical survey of some of the most influential traditional ontologies, such as the distinction between appearance and reality, and the categories of substance and transcendence. The ontology of physical entities - space, time, matter and causation - is examined as well as the ontology of abstract entities such as sets, numbers, properties, relations and propositions. The special problems posed by the subjectivity of mind and of postulating a god are also explored in detail. The final chapter examines the ontology of culture, language and art.

This book constitutes a collection of research achievements mature enough to provide a firm and reliable basis on modular ontologies. It discusses the recent concepts, theories and techniques for knowledge modularization.