Ontologies and Schemas

We present a discussion of various ontology and schema-like artifacts used in various fields of activity such as library sciences, relational databases, knowledge representation and medical informatics. We then discuss languages proposed for representation of ontologies and schemas such as XML Schema [87], RDF Schema [88] and OWL [54] and present a comparative evaluation of these languages. The model-theoretic semantics underlying constructs in RDF Schema and OWL are also presented. A discussion of various tools for ontology creation and authoring is presented. This is followed by a discussion of approaches for semi-automatic bootstrapping and generation of ontologies; ontology matching; and ontology management and versioning. Finally, the role of rule-based approaches for representation and reasoning with ontologies will be presented.