The ontology: Chimaera or Pegasus

In the context of the needs of the Semantic Web and Knowledge Management, we consider what the requirements are of ontologies. The ontology as an artifact of knowledge representation is in danger of becoming a Chimera. We present a series of facts concerning the foundations on which automated ontology construction must build. We discuss a number of different functions that an ontology seeks to fulfill, and also a wish list of ideal functions. Our objective is to stimulate discussion as to the real requirements of ontology engineering and take the view that only a selective and restricted set of requirements will enable the beast to fly.

[1]  Peter Szolovits,et al.  What Is a Knowledge Representation? , 1993, AI Mag..

[2]  Marti A. Hearst,et al.  Finding the flow in web site search , 2002, CACM.

[3]  Steffen Staab,et al.  Comparing Conceptual, Divise and Agglomerative Clustering for Learning Taxonomies from Text , 2004, ECAI.

[4]  Thomas R. Gruber,et al.  A translation approach to portable ontology specifications , 1993, Knowl. Acquis..

[5]  Deborah L. McGuinness,et al.  Ontologies Come of Age , 2003, Spinning the Semantic Web.

[6]  Yorick Wilks,et al.  Designing Adaptive Information Extraction for the Semantic Web in Amilcare , 2003 .

[7]  John Haugeland,et al.  Artificial intelligence - the very idea , 1987 .

[8]  Volker Haarslev,et al.  Description of the RACER System and its Applications , 2001, Description Logics.

[9]  Marvin Minsky,et al.  A Conversation with Marvin Minsky , 1992, AI Mag..

[10]  Ian Horrocks,et al.  Using an Expressive Description Logic: FaCT or Fiction? , 1998, KR.

[11]  Doug Downey,et al.  Methods for Domain-Independent Information Extraction from the Web: An Experimental Comparison , 2004, AAAI.

[12]  Marvin Minsky,et al.  A framework for representing knowledge , 1974 .

[13]  Marvin Minsky,et al.  A framework for representing knowledge" in the psychology of computer vision , 1975 .

[14]  P. Rossi,et al.  (Translation) - Logic and the art of memory: the quest for a universal language , 2000 .

[15]  T. Kuhn,et al.  The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. , 1964 .

[16]  Eran Guter.  Logic and the Art of Memory: The Quest for a Universal Language , 2007 .

[17]  Sergei Nirenburg,et al.  What's in a symbol: ontology, representation and language , 2001, J. Exp. Theor. Artif. Intell..

[18]  Paola Velardi,et al.  Learning Domain Ontologies from Document Warehouses and Dedicated Web Sites , 2004, CL.

[19]  Ramanathan V. Guha,et al.  Cyc: toward programs with common sense , 1990, CACM.

[20]  Kevin Li,et al.  Faceted metadata for image search and browsing , 2003, CHI '03.

[21]  M. Kendall,et al.  The Logic of Scientific Discovery. , 1959 .

[22]  K. Popper,et al.  The Logic of Scientific Discovery , 1960 .

[23]  W. Quine.  The two dogmas of empiricism , 1951 .

[24]  Nicola Guarino,et al.  Some Ontological Principles for Designing Upper Level Lexical Resources , 1998, LREC.

[25]  Nicola Guarino,et al.  Conceptual analysis of lexical taxonomies: the case of WordNet top-level , 2001, FOIS.

[26]  Yorick Wilks,et al.  Background and Foreground Knowledge in Dynamic Ontology Construction: Viewing Text as Knowledge Maintenance , 2003 .

[27]  Hugh Glaser,et al.  CS AKTive space: representing computer science in the semantic web , 2004, WWW '04.