What is an ontology - nice description.

guarino@ladseb.pd.cnr.it (Nicola Guarino)

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Date: Fri, 29 Mar 1996 11:23:19 +0100
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From: guarino@ladseb.pd.cnr.it (Nicola Guarino)
Subject: What is an ontology - nice description.
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In their paper "Ontologies: Principles, Methods and Applications", to
appear on The Knowledge Engineering Review, Mike Uschold and Michael
Gruninger report the following nice summary of what an ontology is, quoting
it from the SRKB mailing list:

Ontologies are agreements about shared conceptualizations. Shared
conceptualizations include conceptual frameworks for modelling domain
knowledge; content-specific protocols for communication among
inter-operating agents; and agreements about the representation of
particular domain theories. In the knowledge sharing context, ontologies
are specified in the form of definitions of representational vocabulary. A
very simple case would be a type hierarchy, specifying classes and their
subsumption relationships. Relational database schemata also serve as
ontologies by specifying the relations that can exist in some shared
database and the integrity constraints that must hold for them.

Does somebody know the author of this definition?

-- Nicola

 ---------------------------------

Nicola Guarino
National Research Council     phone: +39 49 8295751
LADSEB-CNR                      fax:      +39 49 8295778
Corso Stati Uniti, 4                email:   guarino@ladseb.pd.cnr.it
I-35127 Padova
Italy

http://www.ladseb.pd.cnr.it/infor/Ontology/ontology.html
(*** UPDATED 18 March, 1996 ***)