SUO: Building, Sharing, and Merging Ontologies

["John F. Sowa" <sowa@bestweb.net>]

I wrote a tutorial with the above title, which can be found at

   http://www.bestweb.net/~sowa/ontology/ontoshar.htm

Following is the abstract.

John Sowa

                 Building, Sharing, and Merging Ontologies

                               John F. Sowa

Abstract.  For centuries, philosophers have sought universal categories
for classifying everything that exists, lexicographers have sought
universal terminologies for defining everything that can be said, and
librarians have sought universal headings for storing and retrieving
everything that has been written.  During the 1970s, the ANSI SPARC
committee proposed the three-schema architecture for defining and
integrating the database systems that manage the world economy.  Today,
the semantic web has enlarged the task to the level of classifying,
labeling, defining, finding, integrating, and using everything on the
World Wide Web, which is rapidly becoming the universal repository
for all the accumulated knowledge, information, data, and garbage of
humankind.  This talk surveys the issues involved, the approaches that
have been successfully applied to small systems, and the ongoing efforts
to extend them to distributed, interconnected, rapidly growing,
heterogeneous systems.

Contents:

   * 1. What is Ontology?
   * 2. Some Modern Systems
   * 3. Trees, Lattices, and Other Hierarchies
   * 4. Notations for Logic
   * 5. Ontology Sharing and Merging
   * 6. Glossary
   * References

This paper consists of excerpts from previously published articles by
John F. Sowa, updated with new material about ongoing projects on
ontology and their implications for databases, knowledge bases, and the
semantic web.  For more background on these and related topics, see the
book Knowledge Representation.