Ontology formalisms: what is appropriate for different applications?

  • Authors:

  • Craig Schlenoff

  • Affiliations:

  • National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD

  • Venue:
  • PerMIS '09 Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Performance Metrics for Intelligent Systems
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Ontologies can take many forms. There are ontologies that are extremely formal (e.g., using first order logic), and there are ontologies that are less formally defined (e.g., ontologies in the relational databases or dictionaries). Nonetheless, all of these can be considered ontologies and are appropriate in different situations. In this paper, I will present a view of levels of ontology formalizations and then describe three efforts that have applied ontologies to solve real-world problems. I will show where each of these efforts fall on the formalization spectrum and show why that level of formalization is appropriate for that application.