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Encyclopedia of Database Systems pp 1–8Cite as

Lightweight Ontologies

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Synonyms

Business catalogues; Controlled vocabularies; Faceted classifications; Taxonomies; Thesauri; Topic hierarchies; User classifications; Web directories

Definition

Ontologies are explicit specifications of conceptualizations [7]. They are often thought of as directed graphs whose nodes represent concepts and whose edges represent relations between concepts. The notion of a concept is understood as defined in Knowledge Representation, i.e., as a set of objects or individuals [2]. This set is called the concept extension or the concept interpretation. Concepts are often lexically defined, i.e., they have natural language names which are used to describe the concept extensions (e.g., concept motherdenotes the set of all female parents). Therefore, when ontologies are visualized, their nodes are often shown with corresponding natural language concept names. The backbone structure of the ontology graph is a taxonomy in which the relations are “is-a,” whereas the remaining structure...

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Recommended Reading

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Trento, Trento, Italy

    Fausto Giunchiglia & Ilya Zaihrayeu

Authors
  1. Fausto Giunchiglia
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  2. Ilya Zaihrayeu
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Fausto Giunchiglia .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

Section Editor information

  1. Faculty of Industrial Engineering & Management, Technion–Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel

    Avigdor Gal

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Giunchiglia, F., Zaihrayeu, I. (2017). Lightweight Ontologies. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7993-3_1314-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7993-3_1314-2

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4899-7993-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4899-7993-3

  • eBook Packages: Springer Reference Computer SciencesReference Module Computer Science and Engineering

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