What Problems Do Ontologies Help
Solve?
• Heterogeneous database problem
– Different organizational units, Service Needers/Providers have
radically different databases
– Different syntactically: what’s the format?
– Different structurally: how are they structured?
– Different semantically: what do they mean?
– They all speak different languages (access, description, schemas,
meaning)
– Integration: rather than N2 problem, with single, adequate Ontology
reduces to N
ό Enterprise-wide system interoperability problem
– Currently: system-of-systems, vertical stovepipes
– Ontologies act as conceptual model representing enterprise
consensus semantics
• Relevant document retrieval/question-answering problem
– What is the meaning of your query?
– What is the meaning of documents that would satisfy your query?
– Can you obtain only meaningful, relevant documents?