为了方便，我把这段文字全发上来，以供大家参考。
Why would someone want to develop an ontology? Some of the reasons are:
• • To share common understanding of the structure of information among people or software agents
• • To enable reuse of domain knowledge
• • To make domain assumptions explicit
• • To separate domain knowledge from the operational knowledge
• • 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). |
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2007/1/18 16:22:00
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[求助]关于Why develop an Ontology的两段翻译
