Formal Ontology and Information Systems

Research on ontology is becoming increasingly widespread in the com- puter science community, and its importance is being recognized in a multiplicity of research fields and application areas, including knowledge engineering, database design and integration, information retrieval and extraction. We shall use the generic term "in- formation systems", in its broadest sense, to collectively refer to these application per- spectives. We argue in this paper that so-called ontologies present their own methodo- logical and architectural peculiarities: on the methodological side, their main peculiar- ity is the adoption of a highly interdisciplinary approach, while on the architectural side the most interesting aspect is the centrality of the role they can play in an infor- mation system, leading to the perspective of ontology-driven information systems.

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