Ontology understanding in the field of information

I. ORIGIN of the Ontology

Ontology originates from Western philosophy, in view of the history of Western philosophy, ontology as a learning origin of the essence of all things. Ontology is concerned with "existence", that is, what kind of things the world has in nature, or what kinds of entities exist in the world.

The development of ontology in the field of computer science is inseparable from the beginning and development of artificial intelligence and information technology.

But in the field of information, we should draw on the connotation of philosophical ontology, and consider the specific characteristics of ontology in the field of artificial intelligence and information system to do further and standardize the definition of ontology.

Second, the definition of the ontology

Stanford University's Gruber T. R. In 1993, the definition of computer domain ontology, "ontology is a clear specification of conceptualization"

Ontology is a logical theory used to illustrate the predetermined meaning of a formal (formal) glossary.

So you can understand.

1, therefore, the ontology is language-related, and conceptualization is language-independent (conceptualization: conceptualization as the basis for the formal expression of knowledge, is the domain of interest in the objects, concepts and other entities and the relationship between them. ), conceptualization is an abstract, simplified observation of the expressed world from a specific purpose. Each knowledge base, knowledge-based information system, and intelligent agent based on knowledge sharing contain a conceptual world, Either explicit or implicit ontology is an explicit interpretation of a conceptualization that describes the objects in the ontology and the relationships between them are described by the vocabulary of the knowledge expression language.

2. Conceptualization is a broader concept than ontology (which is limited to information science), which is closer to the factual and philosophical ontology of the field.

In summary, I understand that ontology is the formal expression of domain knowledge, so-called domain knowledge, such as e-commerce, commodities, prices, customers these are domain knowledge and concepts. Includes 5 basic primitive classes (classes), relationships (relations), functions (functions), axioms (axioms), and instances (instances). Among them, classes can also be called concepts.

Three, the expression of the ontology

The so-called ontology of the expression is to describe the language of the ontology, currently used to describe the ontology of the language as many as 30, of which the most commonly used is the four types of ontology representation language, which are RDF, RDFS, Daml+oil and Owl.

which

RDF uses three triples, such as resources, properties, and declarations (statement s), to describe things, and rdfs further expands, using a similar framework, by adding RDF S:class, RDF s : subclassof, RDF S-subpropertyof, RDF S:domain, RDF S:range, and other primitives, defining and expressing classes, parent-child classes, parent-child attributes, and attribute domains and ranges.

And Owl is based on descriptive logic of the ontology language, their relationships such as:

Iv. Application of Ontology

The present feeling is mainly three aspects of application:

1, the exchange of information between people and organizations, through the ontology to reduce the concept and the ambiguity of terminology.

2, interoperability between systems: applications use ontology to achieve interoperability between heterogeneous systems, such as Semantic Web services. Main ontology-based information retrieval, information access based on ontology sharing, access to information based on ontology mapping (two different ontology rooms)

3, in the software engineering aspect: In the demand analysis, the ontology through to the question and the task understanding description, enhances the clarity, reduces the analysis cost.

Ontology understanding in the field of information