| Term | Ontology | Comments |
|---|
| Business Rule Design | SWRL | In the late 1980's I had a hard time teaching Business Strategy, MIS, Expert Systems and Policy Audit classes to MBA students. My sense is that with all of the conceptual mapping tools, and the evolving ontology development/editing tools today, the problem of educating/exposing executives to ontology based policy would be much easier. A recent PhD dissertation by R.G., Vice President of Security for a large bank, reinforces this notion. Getting high level enterprise policy aligned with employee reward systems and middle management resource allocation processes seems like a good thing, as long as the rules and the rules for rule making are open and trust-worthy. [Bob Smith, Ph.D.] |
| Classification | International Classification of Diseases Version 10 (ICD-10) | The ICD has become the international standard diagnostic classification for all general epidemiological and many health management purposes. These include the analysis of the general health situation of population groups and monitoring of the incidence and prevalence of diseases and other health problems in relation to other variables such as the characteristics and circumstances of the individuals affected. It is used to classify diseases and other health problems recorded on many types of health and vital records including death certificates and hospital records. In addition to enabling the storage and retrieval of diagnostic information for clinical and epidemiological purposes, these records also provide the basis for the compilation of national mortality and morbidity statistics by WHO Member States. [Ken Baclawski] |
| Concept system | Principles of terminology | |
| Content Models | various - CMC model, iPlayer model, PIPs model | CMC content model is built in Protege, hence the increased likelihood of being called an ontology. Main issues are around over-complexity given the business needs and creation of multiple overlapping models that are inconsistent with each other. [Karen Loasby] |
| Controlled Terminology | SNOMED-CT | |
| controlled vocabulary / thesaurus | Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) Metathesaurus | NLM itself does not use the word ontology to refer to the UMLS Metathesaurus, but more and more of its users do. [Olivier Bodenreider] |
| Controlled vocabulary thesaurus | Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) | The MeSH thesaurus is used by NLM for indexing articles from 4,800 of the world's leading biomedical journals for the MEDLINE/PubMED database. It is also used for the NLM-produced database that includes cataloging of books, documents, and audiovisuals acquired by the Library. Each bibliographic reference is associated with a set of MeSH terms that describe the content of the item. Similarly, search queries use MeSH vocabulary to find items on a desired topic. [Ken Baclawski] |
| data dictionaries | | a common artifact of many software systems that include a relational database as an archive [Doug Holmes] |
| domain model | | Also called an "Analysis Model" [Doug Holmes] |
| enterprise knowledge base | | theese usually seem to have some sort of a taxonomy - or topic map - as an index, and are frequently believed [by users] to serve some of the purposes for which ontologies are developed. [Doug Holmes] |
| Entity Relationship Diagram | | yield to John Sowa [Doug Holmes] |
| Entity Relationship Model/Data Model | ISO 15926-2 | Entity relationship models have roughly the same expressivity as Description Logics. Entity Relationship models are ontologies, but many practitioners are not aware that what they are really doing is ontology, and as a result many of them are not very good ontologies. But a bad ontology is still an ontology. This sort of ontology is easily the most widespread, and has the biggest impact on business and commerce since SQL databases run the worlds economy. [Matthew West] |
| First Order Logic Ontology | SUMO | Well I made this term up to clarify one sort of ontology. Ontologies of this sort are normally targeting at some sort of reasoning, rather than for instance database design. [Matthew West] |
| Folksonomy | CMC user tags | |
| Social Bookmarking tags | Often - for defining interfaces for portals or collaboration spaces - it is said that we need to enable folksonomies rather than create controlled vocabularies like "ontologies" [Lisa Dawn Colvin] |
| | FOLKSONOMY A folksonomy is a user generated taxonomy used to categorize and retrieve Web pages, photographs, Web links and other web content using open ended labels called tags. Typically, folksonomies are Internet-based, but their use may occur in other contexts as well. The process of folksonomic tagging is intended to make a body of information increasingly easier to search, discover, and navigate over time. A well-developed folksonomy is ideally accessible as a shared vocabulary that is both originated by, and familiar to, its primary users. Two widely cited examples of websites using folksonomic tagging are Flickr and del.icio.us, although it has been suggested that Flickr is not a good example of folksonomy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy [Robert Steele] |
| Glossary | | A glossary contains no formal (computer interpretable) relationships between terms, though they may be implied in the text definitions. [Matthew West] |
| Hierarchical Taxonomy | Enterprise Topic Classification Scheme | Topic maps are typically the products of dynamic statistical clustering. This is actually a rule-based topic classification scheme which we use to programmatically classify content. This is used in either search or browsing. Can also be used to support syndication. [Denise Bedford] |
| Library Classification schemes | Universal Decimal Classification; Colon Classification | Faceted classification is nearer to the concept of ontologies. Faceted classification scheme is designed to express the basic structure of the thought content of a document in standard way, instead of just enumerating a group of subject classes. [Nabonita Guha] |
| logical theory, upper ontology | DOLCE | |
| SUMO | |
| Metadata | ISO/IEC 11179 - Metadata registries | This standard specifies a framework for recording and managing the semantics of data. [Dan Gillman] |
| Metadata Scheme | World Bank Core Metadata Strategy | What people sometimes refer to as 'faceted' structures when properly formed is actually a metadata scheme, each facet of which may have its own distinct behavior and structures. There is a need to bring together the people who talk about 'metadata' and the people who talk about 'faceted search'. They using different terms but meaning the same thing. There are discrepancies in business rules applied to each one, though. [Denise Bedford] |
| Metathesaurus | Unified Medical Language System Metathesaurus | The Metathesaurus is a very large, multi-purpose, and multi-lingual vocabulary database that contains information about biomedical and health related concepts, their various names, and the relationships among them. Designed for use by system developers, the Metathesaurus is built from the electronic versions of various thesauri, classifications, code sets, and lists of controlled terms used in patient care, health services billing, public health statistics, indexing and cataloging biomedical literature, and/or basic, clinical, and health services research. These are referred to as the "source vocabularies" of the Metathesaurus. [Ken Baclawski] |
| Model | Version 0.5, 25 July 2006 | Term is found in the Terminology section of the public specification. Term is widely used by the target community (system architects) to describe other things. [Carl Mattocks] |
| Network Taxonomy (sometimes called semantic network or thesaurus) | World Bank MetaThesaurus | Leveraged in topic classification, used to support search (equivalent terms for synonym expansion), other relationships for suggesting other search terms. [Denise Bedford] |
| nomenclature | ISO/IEEE 11073-10101 | Cited as a medical device interoperability standard (ISO/IEEE 11073), the nomenclature section is touted by the developers as the key to semantic interoperability. The standard has not been widely implemented and is not in any format that is computable. [Kathy Lesh] |
| Object Information Model | OIM (just started) | An OIM is not a separate entity, but a dynamic collection of pointers to templates in which a particular class in involved. [Hans Teijgeler] |
| Ontology | | The above usage of ontology is used by all those involved in the OBO Foundry project: http://obofoundry.org [Barry Smith] |
| | Needs to be distingusied from the AI Gruber definition of an ontology as a conceptualisation of a specification. [Chris Partridge] |
| Pizza Ontology | standard tutorial [Doug Holmes] |
| | Emphasis is on the fact, that the ontology is an engineering artifact that models the conceptualization of some human agent (or community). Being a model of something, involves abstracting and omitting parts of the modeled entity. Thus, an ontology can only partially account for a conceptualization. [Florian Probst] |
| SNOMED CT | Although SNOMED CT is built using description logics, I do not consider it a 'true' ontology. It has too many compound (precoordinated) concepts. It does not have natural language text definitions. It is inconsistently modeled. SNOMED CT is trying to be too many things to too many people/groups. [Kathy Lesh] |
| Gene Ontology (GO) | The GO project has developed three structured controlled vocabularies (ontologies) that describe gene products in terms of their associated biological processes, cellular components and molecular functions in a species-independent manner. There are three separate aspects to this effort: first, the development and maintenance of the ontologies themselves; second, the annotation of gene products, which entails making associations between the ontologies and the genes and gene products in the collaborating databases; and third, development of tools that facilitate the creation, maintenance and use of ontologies. [Ken Baclawski] |
| Sequence Ontology (SO) | The Sequence Ontology Project (SO) is a joint effort by genome annotation centres, including: WormBase, the Berkeley Drosophila Genome Project, FlyBase, the Mouse Genome Informatics group, and the Sanger Institute, We are a part of the Gene Ontology Project and our aim is to develop an ontology suitable for describing biological sequences. [Ken Baclawski] |
| Bayesian Web | The Bayesian Web is a proposal to add reasoning about certainty to the Semantic Web [Ken Baclawski] |
| DOLCE | This term and definition is applied in all worlds of semantic interoperability, knowledge engineering, systems architecture and engineering. It is believed that this definition is the only one (that I know of) that reflects the necessary conceptualizations (e.g. intensional vs. extensional conceptualization) required for addressing semantic interoperability issues in SOA, e-commerce, federated systems, standards bodies, etc. etc. It has been used to help characterize sources of error for semantic interoperability and for the creation of semantic interoperability measures, with measurement theory. It has been used in the context of other terms of interest where the associated artifacts of these terms, e.g. taxonomy, may be used in a ontology lifecycle methodology as preliminary artifacts in the process of creating the final product - an ontology. The definition, actually the "Guarino School of Ontology" is being used as a part of a formal grounding for an (Inter-)Enterprise Systems (general systems-theoretic sense) Theory merging technology, knowledge, law, economics, communication(s) etc. [Matthew K. Hettinger] |
| | This definition is intended to capture both the informal and formal approaches to ontology. The differences between these approaches are determined the language used to specify the meanings of the terms. [Michael Gruninger] |
| OWL | |
| | ONTOLOGY In both computer science and information science, an ontology is a data model that represents a set of concepts within a domain and the relationships between those concepts. It is used to reason about the objects within that domain. Ontologies are used in artificial intelligence, the semantic web, software engineering and information architecture as a form of knowledge representation about the world or some part of it. Ontologies generally describe: a.. Individuals: the basic or "ground level" objects b.. Classes: sets, collections, or types of objects[1] c.. Attributes: properties, features, characteristics, or parameters that objects can have and share d.. Relations: ways that objects can be related to one another http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology_%28computer_science%29 [Robert Steele] |
| ontology (computer science) | all of the ontologies built using Protege | |
| ontology (philosophy) | | For people building real systems and services on the Web, the computer science definition (ontology as semantic specification) is the one that matters. [Tom Gruber] |
| Ontology Model | | The term model is used here in the engineering/data modelling sense rather than the locis/model theory sense [Chris Partridge] |
| OWL Ontology | OWL version of ISO 15926-2 | I don't like OWL much, but there it is. There are lots of questions about how to use OWL to represent complex ontological (philosophical) problems. There are also questions about which version of OWL to use. [Matthew West] |
| Reference Model | OASIS RM for SOA | |
| Ring Taxonomy (synonyms) | ISO Country Names, ISO Languages, World Bank currency names | Ontologists may argue about country names, currency names, etc. but the groups that maintain these lists would rarely consider them to be an ontology or even a component of an ontology. [Denise Bedford] |
| schema (??) | ISO 10303 (STEP) | I find this section/these sections confusing and I'm not sure what to enter. The instructions are not clear. [William Burkett] |
| Semantic data model | Conceptual (semantic) entity relationship model | |
| Semantic network | UMLS Semantic Network | The purpose of the Semantic Network is to provide a consistent categorization of all concepts represented in the UMLS Metathesaurus and to provide a set of useful relationships between these concepts. [Ken Baclawski] |
| Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) Semantic Network | Of the 3 knowledge sources in the UMLS, the Semantic Network is the closest to an ontology. It has been proposed as an upper-level ontology for the biomedical domain. [Olivier Bodenreider] |
| tag library | | this idea probably morphed into the current Web 2.0 notion of "tags" - at least it seems like a similar notion [Doug Holmes] |
| Taxonomy | | sometimes called a "backbone" ontology [Doug Holmes] |
| CMC Controlled Vocabularies | used in automatic indexing to describe content, then used to generate navigation between related content. We would like to add more advanced semantic relationships so we can 'type' the relationships [Karen Loasby] |
| | A taxonomy has some formal (computer interpretable) relationships between the terms/concepts. For me this is the minimal level of formal structure that could reasonably be called an ontology. [Matthew West] |
| NICE Taxonomy Scheme | |
| | TAXONOMY Taxonomy, sometimes alpha taxonomy, is the science of describing, categorising and naming organisms, thus giving rise to taxa. For a long time the term "taxonomy" was unambiguous, but over time the word "taxonomy" gained several other meanings and thus became confusing. To some extent it is being replaced, in its original (and narrow) meaning, by "alpha taxonomy". Traditionally there are seven major levels of taxonomy (though alpha taxonomy traditionally focuses more on the specific and infraspecific level): Kingdom, Phylum (for animals) or Division (for plants and fungi), Class, Order, Family, Genus, and Species. Another source of confusion is the relationship to systematics. The words "taxonomy" and "systematics" have a similar history and similar meanings: over time these have been used as synonyms, as overlapping or as completely complementary. a.. In today's usage, Taxonomy (as a science) deals with finding, describing and naming organisms. This science is supported by institutions holding collections of these organisms, with relevant data, carefully curated: such institutes include Natural History Museums, Herbaria and Botanical Gardens. b.. Systematics (as a science) deals with the relationships between taxa, especially at the higher levels. These days systematics is greatly influenced by data derived from DNA from nuclei, mitochondria and chloroplasts. This is sometimes known as molecular systematics which is becoming increasingly more common, perhaps at the expense of traditional taxonomy (Wheeler, 2004). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_taxonomy [Robert Steele] |
| Thesaurus | Controlled Health Thesaurus | Originally developed to tag CDC web pages to improve search and retrieval. CDC changed web search strategies and the thesaurus is being used by some in CDC to tag internal documents. The structure was changed from a MeSH model to an IS-A taxonomy with the intent to grow to an ontology. Funding was cut. CDC is putting efforts into building 'value sets'. The thesaurus has the potential to be the glue to link the value sets as well as assist with discovery and decision support - if it were funded. [Kathy Lesh] |
| National Agricultural Library Thesaurus (NALT) | Online vocabulary look-up tool for agricultural and biological terms [Ken Baclawski] |
| | Thesauri consist of more than strictly hierarchical relationships (taxonomic, partonomic, instantative) by including Related Terms and Scope Notes. These additional relationships could be considered the beginning of an ontological scheme because they are mapping customized semantic relationships. In fact, ontologies simply specify with more precision the different types of Related Terms within a Thesaurus. [Paul King] |
| upper ontology | BFO (Basic Formal Ontology) | I will list the Upper Ontology artifacts represented at the Upper Ontology Summit 2006 here. [Peter Yim] |