Community Ontologies

Present

Past

Subjects

Projects

Misc

COMMUNITY ONTOLOGIES

Definitions

'XML makes it cost-effective to capture community ontologies as Document Type Definitions to decentralize the control of specialized markup languages.'

'An ontology codifies the concepts that are noteworthy to a community so that everyone has a common level of understanding upon which future knowledge can proceed. The reverse phenomenon is equally powerful: mastery of the jargon confers membership in the community.'

'Communities are mirrored by ontology: when a large community has to use a single ontology, its value is diluted to the least common denominator (as exemplified by HTML itself).'

from the 'Evolution of Web Documents: The Ascent of XML'
http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~adam/papers/xml/ascent-of-xml.html

'An ontology is a specification of a conceptualization'

'A body of formally represented knowledge is based on a conceptualization: the objects, concepts, and other entities that are assumed to exist in some area of interest and the relationships that hold among them. A conceptualization is an abstract, simplified view of the world that we wish to represent for some purpose.'

'An ontology is an explicit specification of a conceptualization. The term is borrowed from philosophy, where an ontology is a systematic account of existence.'

from 'What is an Ontology?'

http://www-ksl.stanford.edu/kst/what-is-an-ontology.html

This branch of philosophy or metaphysics is concerned with the nature of existence. Ontological assumptions are those assumptions that underpin theories about what kind of entities can exist.

from the Penguin Dictionary of Sociology

'Ontologies ultimately embody the survival principle that self-representative or self-describing systems reduce the cost of entry. By developing a Web address for some fragment of knowledge containing programs and/or information, and then sharing the address with someone else, authors can allow the democratic process play out: anyone in the Web community can indicate that the ideas are good by linking to the handle for future usage. They neither copy the document as is, nor copy the document and make make minor changes, because to do so would be too expensive; the cheapest way to propagate ideas is by address. This feeds the cycle of natural selection in knowledge representation: usage determines community, which in turn refines the common ontology.'

from 'The Origin of (Document) Species'

http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~adam/papers/www/origin-of-species.html

Sites Relevant to Ontologies and Knowledge Sharing

http://www-ksl.stanford.edu/kst/ontology-sources.html

Please report errors to --> errors@alamut.com
This page was first created on --> 5/3/98; 21:04:17 CET
This page was last modified on --> 10/3/98; 8:34:09 CET