Ontologies/Knowledge Sharing
Topics:
Every Ontology Is a Treaty
Thomas Gruber (2004). Every Ontology is a Treaty. Interview for Semantic Web and Information Systems SIG of the Association for Information Systems. SIGSEMIS Bulletin, Volume 1, Issue 3. October, 2004.
Interview with a Semantic Web organization, published in their journal of record, in which I argue that ontologies are designed in a social context. It was a radical idea back then that the meaning of formal knowledge representations are situated in human society. It also predicted that standardizing ontologies top down would fail.
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Enabling Technology for Knowledge Sharing
Robert Neches, Richard Fikes, Tim Finin, Thomas Gruber, Ramesh Patil, Ted Senator, and William R. Swartout (1991). Enabling technology for knowledge sharing. AI Magazine, 12(3):16-36, 1991.
The manifesto publication of the DARPA Knowledge Sharing Effort, describing the layers which eventually morphed and survived somewhat scathed in the formalisms of the Semantic Web. Historically interesting given what has happened since with XML.
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Ontology (Definition)
Tom Gruber (2008), Ontology. Entry in the Encyclopedia of Database Systems, Ling Liu and M. Tamer Özsu (Eds.), Springer-Verlag, 2009.
Provides a definition of ontology as a technical term for computer science, tracing its historical context from philosophy and AI. Definitional article in the encyclopedia of database systems on ontology. Update of 1993 ontology definition
For a recent citation, see: Gruber T. (2016) Ontology. In: Liu L., Özsu M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY.
Topics:
Thomas R. Gruber (1993). Toward principles for the design of ontologies used for knowledge sharing. Originally in N. Guarino and R. Poli, (Eds.), International Workshop on Formal Ontology, Padova, Italy. Revised August 1993. Published in International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, Volume 43 , Issue 5-6 Nov./Dec. 1995, Pages: 907-928, special issue on the role of formal ontology in the information technology.
One of the first attempts at a software development methodology for ontologies. Introduces the notion that ontologies are design and should be amenable to engineering methodologies. Proposes five design criteria for ontologies.
Original abstract: Recent work in Artificial Intelligence is exploring the use of formal ontologies as a way of specifying content-specific agreements for the sharing and reuse of knowledge among software entities. We take an engineering perspective on the development of such ontologies. Formal ontologies are viewed as designed artifacts, formulated for specific purposes and evaluated against objective design criteria. We describe the role of ontologies in supporting knowledge sharing activities, and then present a set of criteria to guide the development of ontologies for these purposes. We show how these criteria are applied in case studies from the design of ontologies for engineering mathematics and bibliographic data. Selected design decisions are discussed, and alternative representation choices and evaluated against the design criteria.
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Thomas Gruber (2007). Collective Knowledge Systems: Where the Social Web meets the Semantic Web. Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web, Volume 6 Issue 1, February, 2008, pp 4-13.
Proposes a class of applications called Collective Knowledge Systems, which are the “killer apps” for the integration of the Social Web (2.0) and the Semantic Web. Characteristics of these systems, principles, and examples from real applications are included.
Original abstract: What can happen if we combine the best ideas from the Social Web and Semantic Web? The Social Web is an ecosystem of participation, where value is created by the aggregation of many individual user contributions. The Semantic Web is an ecosystem of data, where value is created by the integration of structured data from many sources. What applications can best synthesize the strengths of these two approaches, to create a new level of value that is both rich with human participation and powered by well-structured information? This paper proposes a class of applications called collective knowledge systems, which unlock the “collective intelligence” of the Social Web with knowledge representation and reasoning techniques of the Semantic Web.
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Thomas R. Gruber (1993). A Translation Approach to Portable Ontology Specifications. Knowledge Acquisition, 5(2), 1993, pp. 199-220.
This is the official Ontolingua paper, containing the fabled definition of ontology as a specification of a conceptualization.
This is the paper that first published the fabled definition of ontology as specification, with a theoretical grounding in AI agency and knowledge representation. This journal was merged into the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, and this paper was recognized as the highest cited article in the history of those journals.
Abstract: To support the sharing and reuse of formally represented knowledge among AI systems, it is useful to define the common vocabulary in which shared knowledge is represented. A specification of a representational vocabulary for a shared domain of discourse — definitions of classes, relations, functions, and other objects — is called an ontology. This paper describes a mechanism for defining ontologies that are portable over representation systems.
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