Ontologies, Ontolingua, and the Knowledge Sharing Stack
In the early 1990’s, a group of AI and DB groups got together to define a standard architecture stack for allowing intelligent systems to interoperate over a knowledge bus and share data, models, and other knowledge without sharing data schema or formats. Tom was part of a collaborative team comprised of colleagues from different institutions and companies, and he co-led the effort for the part of the stack related to ontology sharing. He established the DARPA Knowledge Sharing Library, a web-based public exchange for ontologies, software, and knowledge bases. He gets cited a lot for clarifying a definition of ontology for the AI community and for promoting the vision of ontologies as enabling technology for the Semantic Web.
Latest Work
- Updated Definition of Ontology for Encyclopedia of Database Systems
- TagOntology
Writing
- Ontologies as enabling technology for knowledge exchange
- Engineering principles for ontology design
- Ontologies as standards for information interchange
- Ontologies as social contracts