Abstract
In recent years the development of ontologies - explicit formal specifications
of the terms in the domain and relations among them -has been moving from the
realm of Artificial-Intelligence laboratories to the desktops of domain experts.
Ontologies have also become common on the World-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).
On the Web and in many large applications ontologies serve a variety of purposes:
making the knowledge about a particular domain explicit, sharing and reusing
this knowledge, analyzing domain knowledge. A number of languages for defining
ontologies on the Web, such as RDF(S) and DAML+OIL, are under development. In
this tutorial we will discuss why one would build an ontology and present a
methodology for creating ontologies based on declarative knowledge representation
systems. We will present ontology examples, discuss common problems and pitfalls
in ontology development and approaches to solving the problems. We will also
give a brief overview of the current research issues in ontology engineering
and compare some Web-based ontology-representation languages.
About The Speaker
Natalya F. Noy is a research scientist in the Stanford Medical Informatics
laboratory at Stanford University. Her research focuses on ontology development
and evaluation, semantic integration of ontologies, and making ontology-development
accessible to experts in noncomputer-science domains. She is a member of the
Protégé group at Stanford University, which develops a graphical and extensible
software environment for ontology editing. She has received a PhD degree from
Northeastern University concentrating on the challenges of ontology development
in experimental sciences.
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