Abstract
Ontologies are increasingly recognized as essential components in many fields of information science. Ontologies were first employed in artificial intelligence, as a means to conceptualize some part of the real world. The first aim was to enable software system to reason about real-world entities. The CyC ontology (Lenat 1995) is typical of this perspective, it is comprised of several thousand concepts and tens of thousand facts, expressed as logical formulae. A second aim of ontologies was to provide a common conceptualization of a domain on which different agents agree. It is certainly this aspect of ontologies that triggered widespread interest in this knowledge engineering artifact in fields such as information system design, system integration and interoperation, natural language processing, or information retrieval. For instance, the Gene ontology (The Gene Ontology Consortium 2001) provides a common vocabulary to standardize the representation of gene and gene products.
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Notes
- 1.
For instance the Swoogle ontology search engine (http://swoogle.umbc.edu/) announces more than 10,000 indexed ontologies.
- 2.
The Protégé ontology editor has more than 100,000 registered users.
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The Gene Ontology Consortium: Creating the gene ontology resource: design and implementation. Genome Res. 11, 1425–1433 (2001). doi:10.1101/gr.180801
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© 2011 Springer-Verlag London Limited
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Falquet, G., Métral, C., Teller, J., Tweed, C. (2011). Introduction. In: Ontologies in Urban Development Projects. Advanced Information and Knowledge Processing, vol 1. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-85729-724-2_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-85729-724-2_1
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