Ontologies

Abstract

Ontologies were developed in Artificial Intelligence to facilitate knowledge sharing and reuse. Since the beginning of the nineties ontologies have become a popular research topic investigated by several Artificial Intelligence research communities, including Knowledge Engineering, natural-language processing and knowledge representation. More recently, the notion of ontology is also becoming widespread in fields such as intelligent information integration, cooperative information systems, information retrieval, electronic commerce, and knowledge management. The reason ontologies are becoming so popular is in large part due to what they promise: a shared and common understanding of some domain that can be communicated between people and application systems.