文本框由字数限制，但我把文章放到下载里了！只好把后面的贴出来了！
An ontology defines a common vocabulary for researchers who need to share information in a domain. It includes machine-interpretable definitions of basic concepts in the domain and relations among them.
Why would someone want to develop an ontology? Some of the reasons are:
?span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman""> To share common understanding of the structure of information among people or software agents
?span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman""> To enable reuse of domain knowledge
?span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman""> To make domain assumptions explicit
?span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman""> To separate domain knowledge from the operational knowledge
?span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman""> To analyze domain knowledge
Sharing common understanding of the structure of information among people or software agents is one of the more common goals in developing ontologies (Musen 1992; Gruber 1993). For example, suppose several different Web sites contain medical information or provide medical e-commerce services. If these Web sites share and publish the same underlying ontology of the terms they all use, then computer agents can extract and aggregate information from these different sites. The agents can use this aggregated information to answer user queries or as input data to other applications.
Enabling reuse of domain knowledge was one of the driving forces behind recent surge in ontology research. For example, models for many different domains need to represent the notion of time. This representation includes the notions of time intervals, points in time, relative measures of time, and so on. If one group of researchers develops such an ontology in detail, others can simply reuse it for their domains. Additionally, if we need to build a large ontology, we can integrate several existing ontologies describing portions of the large domain. We can also reuse a general ontology, such as the UNSPSC ontology, and extend it to describe our domain of interest.
Making explicit domain assumptions underlying an implementation makes it possible to change these assumptions easily if our knowledge about the domain changes. Hard-coding assumptions about the world in programming-language code makes these assumptions not only hard to find and understand but also hard to change, in particular for someone without programming expertise. In addition, explicit specifications of domain knowledge are useful for new users who must learn what terms in the domain mean.
Separating the domain knowledge from the operational knowledge is another common use of ontologies. We can describe a task of configuring a product from its components according to a required specification and implement a program that does this configuration independent of the products and components themselves (McGuinness and Wright 1998). We can then develop an ontology of PC-components and characteristics and apply the algorithm to configure made-to-order PCs. We can also use the same algorithm to configure elevators if we “feed” an elevator component ontology to it (Rothenfluh et al. 1996).
Analyzing domain knowledge is possible once a declarative specification of the terms is available. formal analysis of terms is extremely valuable when both attempting to reuse existing ontologies and extending them (McGuinness et al. 2000).
Often an ontology of the domain is not a goal in itself. Developing an ontology is akin to defining a set of data and their structure for other programs to use. Problem-solving methods, domain-independent applications, and software agents use ontologies and knowledge bases built from ontologies as data. For example, in this paper we develop an ontology of wine and food and appropriate combinations of wine with meals. This ontology can then be used as a basis for some applications in a suite of restaurant-managing tools: One application could create wine suggestions for the menu of the day or answer queries of waiters and customers. Another application could analyze an inventory list of a wine cellar and suggest which wine categories to expand and which particular wines to purchase for upcoming menus or cookbooks.
About this guide
We build on our experience using Prot間?2000 (Protege 2000), Ontolingua (Ontolingua 1997), Chimaera (Chimaera 2000) as ontology-editing environments. In this guide, we use Prot間?2000 for our examples.
The wine and food example that we use throughout this guide, is loosely based on an example knowledge base presented in the paper describing CLASSIC—a knowledge-representation system based on a description-logics approach (Brachman et al. 1991). The CLASSIC tutorial (McGuinness et al. 1994) has developed this example further. Prot間?2000 and other frame-based systems describe ontologies declaratively, stating explicitly what the class hierarchy is and to which classes individuals belong. Some ontology-design ideas in this guide originated from the literature on object-oriented design (Rumbaugh et al. 1991; Booch et al. 1997). However, ontology development is different from designing classes and relations in object-oriented programming. Object-oriented programming centers primarily around methods on classes—a programmer makes design decisions based on the operational properties of a class, whereas an ontology designer makes these decisions based on the structural properties of a class. As a result, a class structure and relations among classes in an ontology are different from the structure for a similar domain in an object-oriented program.
It is impossible to cover all the issues that an ontology developer may need to grapple with and we are not trying to address all of them in this guide. Instead, we try to provide a starting point; an initial guide that would help a new ontology designer to develop ontologies. At the end, we suggest places to look for explanations of more complicated structures and design mechanisms if the domain requires them.
Finally, there is no single correct ontology-design methodology and we did not attempt to define one. The ideas that we present here are the ones that we found useful in our own ontology-development experience. At the end of this guide we suggest a list of references for alternative methodologies.
[返回] 中文XML论坛 - 专业的XML技术讨论区 →
W3CHINA.ORG讨论区 - Web新技术讨论 → 『 Semantic Web(语义Web)/描述逻辑/本体 』 → [转帖]<< A Guide to Creating Your First Ontology>> by Natalya F. Noy and Deborah L. McGuinness Stanford University,一篇很好文章,希望能够加精华,很想看看FTP里的东东
(订阅本版)
2006/5/13 11:42:00
新浪微博
[转帖]<< A Guide to Creating Your First Ontology>> by Natalya F. Noy and Deborah L. McGuinness Stanford University,一篇很好文章,希望能够加精华,很想看看FTP里的东东
