The overwhelming use of Internet emphasizes the need for efficient
techniques aiming at facilitating the understanding of the information
that is found over the Web. This need for understanding is currently
addressed through the development of ontologies. The push towards an
effective use of ontologies as a means to achieve semantic interoperability
is, in our opinion, shifting the focus from purely taxonomic ontologies
to more descriptive ontologies. These would namely provide agreed
descriptions of the data structures representing the complex organization
of objects and links of interest within the targeted domain.
This seminar will analyze the requirements for such descriptive
ontologies, and contrast the requirements to the functionality provided
by some current representative approaches that have been proposed for
ontology management. Selected approaches originate from research in
rtificial intelligence, knowledge representation, and database
conceptual modeling. |