Ontology

Ontology of Ice-Cream

Ontology is the structure of meaning within a given domain, reality or world. An ontology in Software Engineering^[1] requires research, study, design, management and architecture with great attention to details. Ontology^[2] is studied by many other disciplines as well, from Psychology to Philosophy and Mathematics to the Sciences.

Definition

Simplified definition from Stanford University:

"An ontology is a specification of a conceptualization." ^[3]

From the same ontologist, Dr. Tom Gruber:

"A translation approach to portable ontologies."^[4]

From About.com:

"Web ontologies describe the relationships between entities, usually referred to as "kinds", and how the different kinds of entities are related."^[5]

From dictionaries:

"the branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being"^[6]

"a particular theory about the nature of being or the kinds of things that have existence"^[7]

"the set of entities presupposed by a theory"^[8]

Overall top result from web searches:

"The subject of ontology is the study of the categories of things that exist or may exist in some domain. The product of such a study, called an ontology, is a catalog of the types of things that are assumed to exist in a domain of interest D from the perspective of a person who uses a language L for the purpose of talking about (describing) D."^[9]

Last but not least, the technical description from Wikipedia:

"In theory, an ontology is a "formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualization". An ontology renders shared vocabulary and taxonomy, which models a domain — that is, the definition of objects and/or concepts, and their properties and relations.

Ontologies are the structural frameworks for organizing information and are used in artificial intelligence, the Semantic Web, systems engineering, software engineering, biomedical informatics, library science, enterprise bookmarking, and information architecture as a form of knowledge representation about the world or some part of it. The creation of domain ontologies is also fundamental to the definition and use of an enterprise architecture framework.

The term ontology has its origin in philosophy, and has been applied in many different ways. The word "ontology" comes from the Greek ὄν (on), which literally means 'existence'. The core meaning within computer science is a model for describing the world that consists of a set of types, properties, and relationship types. Exactly what is provided around these varies, but they are the essentials of an ontology. There is also generally an expectation that there be a close resemblance between the real world and the features of the model in an ontology.

Historically, ontologies arise out of the branch of philosophy known as metaphysics, which deals with the nature of reality – of what exists. This fundamental branch is concerned with analyzing various types or modes of existence, often with special attention to the relations between particulars and universals, between intrinsic and extrinsic properties, and between essence and existence. The traditional goal of ontological inquiry in particular is to divide the world "at its joints", to discover those fundamental categories, or kinds, into which the world’s objects naturally fall.

During the second half of the 20th century, philosophers extensively debated the possible methods or approaches to building ontologies, without actually building any very elaborate ontologies themselves. By contrast, computer scientists were building some large and robust ontologies (such as WordNet and Cyc) with comparatively little debate over how they were built.

Since the mid-1970s, researchers in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) have recognized that capturing knowledge is the key to building large and powerful AI systems. AI researchers argued that they could create new ontologies as computational models that enable certain kinds of automated reasoning. In the 1980s, the AI community began to use the term ontology to refer to both a theory of a modeled world and a component of knowledge systems. Some researchers, drawing inspiration from philosophical ontologies, viewed computational ontology as a kind of applied philosophy." ^[10]

Reading through these separate definitions should paint a reasonable picture of what an Ontology is; though as with any Ontology itself, it is clear that (despite some overlap in ideas) not everyone agrees on a single definition or view of the concept. The underlying principle though, seems to be description(s) about a perception of a thing or group of things in the world, whether those things are tangible or intangible, physical or virtual, in existence or simply imagined.

Specifications

The Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Flat File Format Specification, version 1.2: http://www.geneontology.org/GO.format.obo-1_2.shtml
DL

OWL

OWL

RDF

RDF

Ontologies

Ontology Metadata Vocabulary (OMV): http://omv2.sourceforge.net/

Text

DBpedia Ontology (DBO): https://www.dbpedia.org/resources/ontology/ (one of the bset "general concept" ontologies, with full Wikipedia articles converted to LoD)

Video

LSCOM (Large Scale Ontology for Multimedia) Ontology: http://www.lscom.org/
W3C -- Media Annotations Working Group (Video, Audio, Images): http://www.w3.org/2008/WebVideo/Annotations/
Use Cases and Requirements for Ontology and API for Media Object 1.0: http://dev.w3.org/2008/video/mediaann/mediaont-req/mediaont-req.html

TV

BBC TV Programmes ontology: http://www.bbc.co.uk/ontologies/programmes/2009-09-07.shtml
URIPlay - URIplay is a name service and data format for 'playable' media content, giving it URIs and simple descriptions. The service is suitable for describing delivery of TV and radio content, and other audio and video that was produced for non-broadcast delivery (e.g. podcasts and video blogs).: http://uriplay.org/spec/ontology/

Mobile

WURFL - Wireless Universal Resource File: http://wurfl.sourceforge.net/

Mobile TV

MobileTV: http://bcmoney.org/spec/mobiletv
MobileTV (specification): http://bcmoney.org/mobiletv.owl
Freebase - BASE: http://www.freebase.com/view/user/bcmoney/mobile_tv

Images

W3C -- Image Annotation on the Semantic Web: http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-swbp-image-annotation-20060322/

Comics

Toonopedia Glossary: http://www.toonopedia.com/glossary.htm | EXAMPLE - rotoscope

News

NEWS - BusinessEvents Ontology: http://www.opencalais.com/applications/opencalais-contributes-newsevents-ontology

Publishing

Semantic Web Publishing RDFS Ontology: http://tw.rpi.edu/portal/Semantic_Publishing_RDFS_Ontology

Portals

Semantic Portal project: http://sw-portal.deri.org/

Trust

Web Of Trust RDF Ontology: http://xmlns.com/wot/0.1/

Friends

FOAF (Friend-Of-A-Friend) ontology: http://www.foaf-project.org/

Groups

Groups Ontology: http://sioc-project.org/ontology

Discussions

Semantically Intelink Online Communities (Discussion) Ontology: http://sioc-project.org/ontology

Events

The Event Ontology: http://motools.sourceforge.net/event/event.html

Conferences

Semantic Web Conference (SWC) -- Academic Conference Ontology: https://web.archive.org/web/20160620111943/http://data.semanticweb.org/ns/swc/swc_2009-05-09.html

Situation

Association Ontology (moods and situation): http://smiy.sourceforge.net/ao/spec/associationontology.html#mood

^[11] ^[12] ^[13] ^[14]^[15] ^[16]^[17]

Statistics

The Statistical Core Vocabulary (scovo): http://sw.joanneum.at/scovo/schema.html

Project

DOAP (Description of a Project): http://web.archive.org/web/20111231220058/http://trac.usefulinc.com/doap^[18]^[19]

Career

DOAC - Description-Of-A-Career: http://ramonantonio.net/doac/0.1/

Resume

Resume RDF ontology: http://rdfs.org/resume-rdf/

Health & Medicine

Unified Medical Language System: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/umls/
OpenClinical - Ontologies: http://www.openclinical.org/ontologies.html
OLS - (Medical) Ontology Lookup Service: http://www.ebi.ac.uk/ontology-lookup/?termId=MOD:00685
Medical Subject Headings (MeSH): https://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/meshhome.html | SEARCH | SPARQL endpoint | ONTOLOGY | DOWNLOAD^[20]^[21]
Clinical Quality Linked Data on Health.data.gov: http://www.data.gov/communities/node/81/blogs/4920

Environment

Bath Water Quality API Ontology: http://environment.data.gov.uk/lab/doc/api-bwq-reference-v0.2.html

Words

WordNet Ontology: http://xmlns.com/wordnet/1.6/
WordNet data dump in OWL/RDF: http://www.ontologyportal.org/WordNet.owl

Units of Measurement

QUDT - Quantities, Units, Dimensions and Data Types in OWL and XML : http://qudt.org/^[22]^[23]
Units of Measurement Ontology: http://forge.morfeo-project.org/wiki_en/index.php/Units_of_measurement_ontology
Measurement Ontology (draft): http://www.cs.umd.edu/projects/plus/SHOE/onts/measure1.0.html

^[24]

Currency

Monetary Ontology: https://financialcryptography.com/mt/archives/001047.html^[25]
Stock Market Ontology: http://dip.semanticweb.org/documents/D10-7-Stock-Market-Ontology.pdf

Finance

XBRL Ontology Specification: https://www.xbrl.org/the-standard/

Commerce

Business

The Open Source Business Management Ontology (BMO): http://www.bpiresearch.com/Resources/RE_OSSOnt/re_ossont.htm
Business Model Ontology: http://www.slideshare.net/stevendiebold/business-model-ontology
Business Motivation Model (BMM): http://www.omg.org/spec/BMM/

Products

GoodRelations is a lightweight ontology for annotating offerings on the Web. It is to our knowledge the first non-toy vocabulary for describing the types of goods and terms and conditions of items and services offered on the Web. The GoodRelations ontology complements products and services ontologies, like eClassOWL, by providing the vocabulary for expressing things like

   * that a particular Web site describes an offer to sell cellphones of a certain make and model at a certain price,
   * that a pianohouse offers maintenance for pianos that weigh less than 150 kg,
   * or that a car rental company leases out cars of a certain make and model from a particular set of branches across the country.