Research on ontology is becoming increasingly widespread in the computer science community, and its importance is being recognized in a multiplicity of research fields and application areas, including knowledge engineering, database design and integration, information retrieval and extraction. We shall use the generic term information systems, in its broadest sense, to collectively refer to these application perspectives. We argue in this paper that so-called ontologies present their own methodological and architectural peculiarities: on the methodological side, their main peculiarity is the adoption of a highly interdisciplinary approach, while on the architectural side the most interesting aspect is the centrality of the role they can play in an information system, leading to the perspective of ontology-driven information systems.

This paper offers two main contributions. On the one hand, it establishes a general formal framework for developing a foundational ontology of socially constructed entities, in the broadest sense of this notion; on the other hand, it further contributes to understanding the ontological nature of roles. The key choice here is to put all social entities in the domain of discourse: besides social individuals, we also consider ‘reified ’ social concepts and roles, as well as their descriptions, i.e, the ‘social conventions ’ or ‘contexts ’ that define them. This allows us to formally characterize in a first-order theory the relationships among all these entities. 1

Enforcing ontologies as conceptualisation standards in distributed architectures has some important drawbacks. It is, for instance, no solution for the legacy problem. In this article we address the possibility of accepting multiple heterogeneous ontologies in a distributed architecture. After discussing alternative ways to relate several ontologies we look into one particular (hierarchical) configuration of heterogeneous ontologies and examine how information can passed between individual systems that are linked to different ontologies. 1. Introduction A commonly adopted approach to the integration of (heterogeneous) information systems is to define one shared domain ontology and relate the individual information systems to that shared ontology. One way to do this is to enforce the shared ontology as the standard ontology for all participating systems, thus effectively removing heterogeneity. This approach is usually not feasible because the systems to be integrated are already...

Organisations recognise the importance of managing what they consider their most valuable asset: Knowledge. Our work is a contribution towards that end, proposing a system for representing, recording, using, retrieving, and managing knowledge. This paper begins by briefly outlining the concept of an Organisational Memory. It will then discuss the high-level conceptual taxonomy that could be used for the design of an Organisational Memory System based on a form of knowledge representation used in Artificial Intelligence: Ontologies. The paper will then discuss a specific implementation of an Organisational Memory System: a Group Memory System using Design Rationale Systems and Case-Based Reasoning. Examples to illustrate the application of such a Group Memory System in a real organisational setting are provided. 1 INTRODUCTION With the increased quality and quantity of information available within organisations, and the increased flow of information between people and software systems...

Legal ontologies are useful in the design of knowledge systems because they are reusable. A library of such ontologies could greatly enhance the development of legal knowledge systems. In this article we address the creation of such a library. In particular, we discuss four legal ontologies and investigate how the ontologies can be indexed and represented in a library. 1. Introduction What are the building blocks of legal knowledge? Legal philosophers have pondered over this question for a long time. Research in Artificial Intelligence and Law has also run up against this question, albeit from a different angle. Arguably, the creation of a legal knowledge representation requires a conceptualisation of the building blocks of legal knowledge. Eventually, these building blocks will form the basis for operational legal knowledge systems. An important reason for producing ontologies is that they form reusable building blocks for the design of (legal) knowledge systems. Many development met...

this paper first gives an overview of the tiers and then discusses each of them in turn. It sketches how a computational model of ontology could be built and draws some conclusions about its usefulness.

. In this paper, we consider an ontology as a set of terms together with three binary relations on terms, called synonymy, subsumption and crossreference. We present a model-theoretic interpretation of ontologies and we show that this approach although appropriate for deciding the soundness of an ontology, is not sufficient for providing a sound and complete inference procedure for checking the validity of expressions in an ontology. Therefore a different "proof-theoretic" approach which allows checking the validity of expressions is also presented. 1

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. Enforcing ontologies as conceptualisation standards in distributed architectures has some well-known drawbacks. It is, for instance, no solution for the legacy problem. In this article we describe an experiment in accepting structures of (multiple) heterogeneous ontologies for use in distributed architectures. After discussing alternative ways to relate several ontologies we look into one particular (hierarchical) configuration of heterogeneous ontologies and examine how information can passed between individual systems that are linked to different ontologies . 12 1 INTRODUCTION A commonly adopted approach to the integration of (heterogeneous) information systems is to define one shared domain ontology and relate the individual information systems to that shared ontology. One way to do this is to enforce the shared ontology as the standard ontology for all participating systems, thus effectively removing heterogeneity. This approach is usually not feasible because the systems to be...

In developmental biology ontologies are used amongst other things to describe the anatomy of different species in meaningful ways. These ontologies developed inde-pendently for different species. An interesting task is now to establish homology links across these different species to use the knowledge of one organism for other ones. In this MSc project I developed and implemented an application that displays two on-tologies simultaneously and enables biologists to make homology links across species. Two different visualisation techniques have been developed and implemented to eval-uate how different perspectives of the ontology can help in exploring ontologies and support the biologist in making homology links. An evaluation has shown the potential of the different visualisations of the applica-tion and the functionality in achieving its supposed purpose. i Acknowledgements First of all I want to thank my supervisor Stuart Aitken and my co-superviser Bonnie