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

This paper is intended to serve as a comprehensive introduction to the emerging field concerned with the design and use of ontologies. We observe that disparate backgrounds, languages, tools, and techniques are a major barrier to effective communication among people, organisations, and/or software

describe how these problems are addressed by basing Ontolingua itself on an ontology of domain-independent, representational idioms.

in current computer technology. Ontologies provide a shared and common understanding of a domain that can be communicated between people and application systems. Therefore, they may play a major role in supporting information exchange processes in various areas. This book discusses the role ontologies

Least fixpoints as meanings of recursive definitions.

Ontology mapping is seen as a solution provider in today's landscape of ontology research. As the number of ontologies that are made publicly available and accessible on the Web increases steadily, so does the need for applications to use them. A single ontology is no longer enough to support

This paper proposes a new logic programming language called GOLOG whose interpreter automatically maintains an explicit representation of the dynamic world being modeled, on the basis of user supplied axioms about the preconditions and effects of actions and the initial state of the world. This allows programs to reason about the state of the world and consider the effects of various possible courses of action before committing to a particular behavior. The net effect is that programs may be written at a much higher level of abstraction than is usually possible. The language appears well suited for applications in high level control of robots and industrial processes, intelligent software agents, discrete event simulation, etc. It is based on a formal theory of action specified in an extended version of the situation calculus. A prototype implementation in Prolog has been developed.

The OWL Web Ontology Language is a new formal language for representing ontologies in the Semantic Web. OWL has features from several families of representation languages, including primarily Description Logics and frames. OWL also shares many characteristics with RDF, the W3C base of the Semantic

, planetary rover exploration and spacecraft control domains. Other temporal and resource-intensive domains including logistics planning, plant control and manufacturing have also helped to focus the community on the modelling and reasoning issues that must be confronted to make planning technology meet

This paper surveys locally weighted learning, a form of lazy learning and memorybased learning, and focuses on locally weighted linear regression. The survey discusses distance functions, smoothing parameters, weighting functions, local model structures, regularization of the estimates and bias