Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Survey Of Editing Tools For Building Ontologies

Posted by timothy on from the but-what-about-phylogeny dept.

Michael Denny writes "Ontology Building: A Survey of Editing Tools is an up-to-date summary of more than 50 software tools for creating and editing ontologies. A brief introduction to the nature of ontologies and ontology building is included."

4 of 31 comments (clear)

  1. WTF is an Ontology? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Nobody is participating in this discussion because we haven't a clue what "Ontologies" are...

    Blah blah blah... this sentence does not make any sense to non-ontological people...

    The semantic structuring achieved by ontologies differs from the superficial composition and formatting of information (as data) afforded by relational and XML databases. With databases virtually all of the semantic content has to be captured in the application logic. Ontologies, however, are often able to provide an objective specification of domain information by representing a consensual agreement on the concepts and relations characterizing the way knowledge in that domain is expressed. This specification can be the first step in building semantically-aware information systems to support diverse enterprise, government, and personal activities.

  2. Computer Engineering == Economics? by Quixotic+Raindrop · · Score: 3, Interesting

    [rant mode=on]
    I have long despised the "science" of economics because they have an annoying tendency to take common, everyday words, with well-defined meanings, and turn them into something completely unrelated (see: efficient). Now, computer science and knowledge engineering is doing the same thing? Ontology already has a specific, well-defined meaning, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the scope of agent or community relationships and concepts.

    When describing a concept that does not yet have a descriptive word or phrase, don't just assume that you can take a word out of the dictionary and co-opt it for your own use. English is a hard enough language without our academics and researchers stealing words and twisting them to new, completely unrelated topics. If no word fits, make one up!!
    [/rant]

    --
    Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
  3. I have priorities by L.+VeGas · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I don't so much want to learn about ontologies. I want to learn what an ontology is.

    --
    Best Windows Freeware
  4. This is what happens by nosferatu-man · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ... when you let people with grant money and "big ideas" near a concept that they don't understand. They hijack it and produce mountains of meaningless buzzword babble, trying to puff up their own particular snake-oil prescription.

    "Ontologies" indeed. I bet David Hume would loooooove this.

    'jfb

    --
    To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.