Switching Partners: Dancing with the Ontological Engineers

A certain measured, cadenced step, commonly called a "dancing step", which keeps time with, and as it were beats the measure of, the Music which accompanies and directs it, is the essential characteristic which distinguishes a dance from every other sort of motion. (A. Smith 1980, 207) Introduction "Ontology" is a term increasingly used in all areas of computer and information science to denote, roughly, a hierarchically organized classification system associated with a controlled, structured vocabulary that is designed to serve the retrieval and integration of data. An ontology under this view is an artifact whose purpose is to ensure that information about entities in some domain is communicated successfully from one context to another, and this despite differences in opinions about what is the case in that 2 domain or differences in the terminology used by the authors to describe the entities it contains. Ontologies are today being applied in almost every field where research and administration depend upon the alignment of data of distributed provenance. They are being used, for example, by biologists to classify genes, toxins and proteins, and by medical scientists to classify diseases, drugs, therapies, and body parts. An example of the latter is the Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA) which is an ontology of normal adult human and mammalian anatomy. Figure 1 shows the classification of "left leg" in the FMA in which it is categorized, among other things, as being a body part which is part of the left lower limb of either a male or female body. Ontologies are making inroads also in the wider culture. There is an explosion of so-called "folksonomies" used to tag images on the web. The CIDOC ontology is being used by museum authorities to classify cultural artefacts (Doerr 2003). Ontologies have also been developed to assist lawyers in resolving disputes over the nature of patent and copyright and in determining how different versions of musical or literary works are to be treated for purposes of intellectual property protection (Ceusters and Smith 2007). Ontologies of the kind just sketched are primarily used directly by humans to perform some classification task, as for example to provide appropriate general descriptors for organizing scientific papers in a library collection. Users of the library, on the other hand, can use this same ontology to find papers on topics they are interested in. An example of this sort of ontology, for web …