Using Ontology Research in Semantic Web Applications

In the light of improving the World Wide Web, researchers are working towards the Semantic Web. Ontologies and ontology-based applications are its basic ingredients. Several ontological environments, categorizations and methodologies can be found in the literature. This paper shows how we have investigated the state of the art in these areas in an ontology building process that is the basis for an application developed at the later stage in an events organisation domain

Towards a Reference Terminology for Ontology Research and Development in the Biomedical Domain

Ontology is a burgeoning field, involving researchers from the computer science, philosophy, data and software engineering, logic, linguistics, and terminology domains. Many ontology-related terms with precise meanings in one of these domains have different meanings in others. Our purpose here is to initiate a path towards disambiguation of such terms. We draw primarily on the literature of biomedical informatics, not least because the problems caused by unclear or ambiguous use of terms have been there most thoroughly addressed. We advance a proposal resting on a distinction of three levels too often run together in biomedical ontology research: 1. the level of reality; 2. the level of cognitive representations of this reality; 3. the level of textual and graphical artifacts. We propose a reference terminology for ontology research and development that is designed to serve as common hub into which the several competing disciplinary terminologies can be mapped. We then justify our terminological choices through a critical treatment of the ‘concept orientation’ in biomedical terminology research

Ontology mapping: the state of the art

Ontology mapping is seen as a solution provider in today's landscape of ontology research. As the number of ontologies that are made publicly available and accessible on the Web increases steadily, so does the need for applications to use them. A single ontology is no longer enough to support the tasks envisaged by a distributed environment like the Semantic Web. Multiple ontologies need to be accessed from several applications. Mapping could provide a common layer from which several ontologies could be accessed and hence could exchange information in semantically sound manners. Developing such mapping has beeb the focus of a variety of works originating from diverse communities over a number of years. In this article we comprehensively review and present these works. We also provide insights on the pragmatics of ontology mapping and elaborate on a theoretical approach for defining ontology mapping

Ontological Foundations for Geographic Information Science

We propose as a UCGIS research priority the topic of “Ontological Foundations for Geographic Information.” Under this umbrella we unify several interrelated research subfields, each of which deals with different perspectives on geospatial ontologies and their roles in geographic information science. While each of these subfields could be addressed separately, we believe it is important to address ontological research in a unitary, systematic fashion, embracing conceptual issues concerning what would be required to establish an exhaustive ontology of the geospatial domain, issues relating to the choice of appropriate methods for formalizing ontologies, and considerations regarding the design of ontology-driven information systems. This integrated approach is necessary, because there is a strong dependency between the methods used to specify an ontology, and the conceptual richness, robustness and tractability of the ontology itself. Likewise, information system implementations are needed as testbeds of the usefulness of every aspect of an exhaustive ontology of the geospatial domain. None of the current UCGIS research priorities provides such an integrative perspective, and therefore the topic of “Ontological Foundations for Geographic Information Science” is unique

Knowledge organization or information organization : a key component of knowledge management activities

This paper focuses on the various bibliographic and information retrieval tools and techniques used for information organization, a key activity in a knowledge management process. The paper begins with the existing debate on the very concept of knowledge management, and looks at some recent papers and arguments on this issue. It then briefly discusses how some projects over the past decade or so have used various traditional bibliographic organization tools for providing access to electronic resources. This follows examples of some sophistical information organization techniques used by some speciality search engines. It is argued that these tools and techniques, although are quite useful, cannot be used as such in a knowledge management environment. A generic model of information access in a knowledge management environment is then proposed, and new areas of research, especially in the context of information organization are discussed

Introducing realist ontology for the representation of adverse events

The goal of the REMINE project is to build a high performance prediction, detection and monitoring platform for managing Risks against Patient Safety (RAPS). Part of the work involves developing in ontology enabling computer-assisted RAPS decision support on the basis of the disease history of a patient as documented in a hospital information system. A requirement of the ontology is to contain a representation for what is commonly referred to by the term 'adverse event', one challenge being that distinct authoritative sources define this term in different and context-dependent ways. The presence of some common ground in all definitions is, however, obvious. Using the analytical principles underlying Basic Formal Ontology and Referent Tracking, both developed in the tradition of philosophical realism, we propose a formal representation of this common ground which combines a reference ontology consisting exclusively of representations of universals and an application ontology which consists representations of defined classes. We argue that what in most cases is referred to by means of the term 'adverse event' - when used generically - is a defined class rather than a universal. In favour of the conception of adverse events as forming a defined class are the arguments that (1) there is no definition for 'adverse event' that carves out a collection of particulars which constitutes the extension of a universal, and (2) the majority of definitions require adverse events to be (variably) the result of some observation, assessment or (absence of) expectation, thereby giving these entities a nominal or epistemological flavour

Towards Desiderata for an Ontology of Diseases for the Annotation of Biological Datasets

There is a plethora of disease ontologies available, all potentially useful for the annotation of biological datasets. We define seven desirable features for such ontologies and examine whether or not these features are supported by eleven disease ontologies. The four ontologies most closely aligned with our desiderata are Disease Ontology, SNOMED CT, NCI thesaurus and UMLS

John Searle: Making the Social World. The Structure of Human Civilization

ontology, social institutions, social reality, commitment, speech act, social science

Referent tracking for corporate memories

For corporate memory and enterprise ontology systems to be maximally useful, they must be freed from certain barriers placed around them by traditional knowledge management paradigms. This means, above all, that they must mirror more faithfully those portions of reality which are salient to the workings of the enterprise, including the changes that occur with the passage of time. The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate how theories based on philosophical realism can contribute to this objective. We discuss how realism-based ontologies (capturing what is generic) combined with referent tracking (capturing what is specific) can play a key role in building the robust and useful corporate memories of the future