via its meaningful label to give a value for a given entity. Populated tables are fed into templates that can then be used to generate the ontology’s axioms. Populous separates knowledge gathering from the conceptualisation; it also removes users from the usual ontology authoring tools. Availability

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

to a large number of ontologies covering overlapping domains. In order for these ontologies to be reused, they first need to be merged or aligned to one another. The processes of ontology alignment and merging are usually handled manually and often constitute a large and tedious portion

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

Reusable ontologies are becoming increasingly important for tasks such as information integration, knowledge-level interoperation, and knowledgebase development. We have developed a set of tools and services to support the process of achieving consensus on common shared ontologies by geographically

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

-Wide Web. The ontologies on the Web range from large taxonomies categorizing Web sites (such as on Yahoo!) to categorizations of products for sale and their features (such as on Amazon.com). The WWW Consortium (W3C) is developing the Resource Description Framework (Brickley and Guha 1999), a language

-structured and fully structured data in order to support a semi-automatic, cooperative ontology engineering process. Our ontology learning framework proceeds through ontology import, extraction, pruning, refinement, and evaluation giving the ontology engineer a wealth of coordinated tools for ontology modeling

, functions, and other objects — is called an ontology. This paper describes a mechanism for defining ontologies that are portable over representation systems. Definitions written in a standard format for predicate calculus are translated by a system called Ontolingua into specialized representations

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