Concept

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 growing popularity of ontologies is in a large part due to what they promise: a shared understanding of some domain that can be communicated between people and application systems. Currently computers are changing from single isolated devices to entry points into a worldwide network of information exchange and business transactions. Therefore support in the exchange of data, information, and knowledge is becoming the key issue in current computer technology. Providing shared domain structures is becoming essential, and ontologies will therefore become a key asset in describing the structure and semantics of information exchange.