Survey Of Editing Tools For Building Ontologies 31
Michael Denny writes "Ontology Building: A Survey of Editing Tools is an up-to-date summary of more than 50 software tools for creating and editing ontologies. A brief introduction to the nature of ontologies and ontology building is included."
WTF is an Ontology? (Score:1, Interesting)
Blah blah blah... this sentence does not make any sense to non-ontological people...
The semantic structuring achieved by ontologies differs from the superficial composition and formatting of information (as data) afforded by relational and XML databases. With databases virtually all of the semantic content has to be captured in the application logic. Ontologies, however, are often able to provide an objective specification of domain information by representing a consensual agreement on the concepts and relations characterizing the way knowledge in that domain is expressed. This specification can be the first step in building semantically-aware information systems to support diverse enterprise, government, and personal activities.
Re:WTF is an Ontology? (Score:2)
Something like a concussion , a nasty hangover , hallucinogenic drugs or maybe a graduate degree?
Oh wait, maybe this is for editing other peoples "ontologies" ? Maybe some sort of religious war is involved?
But seriously, This looks like good stuff with a terrible name,
Computer Engineering == Economics? (Score:3, Interesting)
I have long despised the "science" of economics because they have an annoying tendency to take common, everyday words, with well-defined meanings, and turn them into something completely unrelated (see: efficient). Now, computer science and knowledge engineering is doing the same thing? Ontology already has a specific, well-defined meaning, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the scope of agent or community relationships and concepts.
When describing a concept that does not yet have a descriptive word or phrase, don't just assume that you can take a word out of the dictionary and co-opt it for your own use. English is a hard enough language without our academics and researchers stealing words and twisting them to new, completely unrelated topics. If no word fits, make one up!!
[/rant]
Re:Computer Engineering == Economics? (Score:3, Insightful)
The only other time I've come across ontology is in philosophy, where it has a precise and well understood (among philosophers) meaning. I don't think there will be much general confusion.
I agree that the sort of behaviour you talk about is bad when it causes an old meaning of a word to become useless, because people confuse it with the new meaning. In this case we are talking about a rather arcane word being co-opted from philosophers by information scientists. There's little reason to use the word in general conversation, and little chance that either of the two groups above will confuse the word or use it sloppily.
Now, the abuse of the word 'enormity' is a different story altogether...
Re:Computer Engineering == Economics? (Score:1)
Re:Computer Engineering == Economics? (Score:2)
Little help people (Score:2)
I have priorities (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I have priorities (Score:2)
It's a way to leverage the synergy of paradigms.
Or in otherwords, the CS equivalent of management consultant bullshit.
This is what happens (Score:3, Interesting)
"Ontologies" indeed. I bet David Hume would loooooove this.
'jfb
Ontology: (Score:4, Informative)
Ontology On*tol"o*gy, n. Gr. ? the things which exist
(pl.neut. of ?, ?, being, p. pr. of ? to be) + -logy: cf.F.
ontologie.
That department of the science of metaphysics which
investigates and explains the nature and essential properties
and relations of all beings, as such, or the principles and
causes of being.
I still don't get it...
Heh (Score:5, Funny)
At least they're developing something useful!
For a while, I was afraid they were developing ways for studying tautology!
Can't... (Score:1)
Simple Explanation (Score:5, Informative)
Animals -> Birds -> Flightless Birds -> Penguins
It is an important first step into AI and computer interaction.
Unfortunately I found the article as useful as those old programs where the computer would try and guess what you were thinking about.
Re:Simple Explanation (Score:1)
Are they always hierarchical? I think hierarchies are overused, or at least oversold, in computer science. I have kicked around some set-based classification systems and interfaces here [geocities.com]. It includes an example college store which needs to classify its products. Hierarchies don't work well because a given item can fall under multiple categories.
The Dewey Decimal System sometimes has this problem also. For example, does a book about computerized gene studies go under the Biology section or the Computer section? Ideally, it should go under both. Sets allow this, while nested classifications don't (without node duplication).
Re:Simple Explanation (Score:1)
Yes, that's how it is being used. That's NOT what ontology means.
Taxonomy would be a better word for this.
Re:Simple Explanation (Score:1)
Actually, the advertised purpose of the ontology projects was to permit interchange of information between different intelligent systems. Ideally, the definitional information contained in the ontology was to permit different reasoning systems to understand each other's representations and communications. I would say the jury is still out on the utility of this approach.
There have long been systems that attempted to describe objects and their relationships (all the way back to Minsky's frames in the late 60s or early 70s. The ontologies were supposed to have some semantic groundwork that would let them be interchangeable and allow translation between different ontologies.
Similarly, on the web, ontologies for web page contents were intended to permit programs to grok the meaning of those web pages.
Unfortunately, a lot of effort seems to have gone into syntax and semantics of the ontologies themselves. This leaves some holes in:
RTFA (Score:2)
However, I found it useful if only for one part, where they talk about ontology construction. If you read it, it looks just like a systems analysis job slightly rephrased. Find out what the entities are, establish the relationships between entities, logicalise, rationalise, and finally populate the resulting structures. There, that wasn't so hard, was it?
It looks to my simple and fast ageing mind as if we end up with something like a DFD in which data stores are replaced by sets and data flows are replaced by relationships, and I have no idea at all what happens with processes. Having done a bit of KB work in the late 80s and then failed totally to keep up with the field, I'd like to know more at a practical level, but without having to understand medical applications. Anybody got any good links?
Practical useability for slashdotters (Score:1)
Example: Who made requirements document X and which code implements this?
In the (I hope near) future, Operating systems are replaced by ontology editors, where instead of "files" we work with a network of accociated data, where ourselves, and agents, will navigate through, in a intuitive manner.
Missing information (Score:2)
Given the fact that I am (on occasion) willing to part with my $$$ for software if necessary, I definitely would have liked to see pricing information included in this table, if only to rule out those tools which are out of my price-range.
Very Interesting Piece... (Score:1)
Has to do with an aspect of conceptual processing, an AI area which is the core of AI and gets very little work done in it...
But without it, you'll never have AI - nor will you ever have intelligent systems development technologies - which means the crap being sold today will continue to be sold...
So get on it...
A website about Ontology (Score:1)
I'd made a research on Ontology Tools for Repositories on Internet [bilkent.edu.tr] including a quite satisfactory survey of ontology subject and a preliminary ontology language design for a grad. course given by Varol Akman at Bilkent CS. Dept.
It answers the quintessential question of "What is an Ontology?"
Thanks,