Survey Of Editing Tools For Building Ontologies

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."

Comments

Computer Engineering == Economics?

[Quixotic Raindrop]

[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]

Re:Computer Engineering == Economics?

[Jon Peterson]

Hey, come on, we can live with a little operator overloading in natural languages.

The only other time I've come across ontology is in philosophy, where it has a precise and well understood (among philosophers) meaning. I don't think there will be much general confusion.

I agree that the sort of behaviour you talk about is bad when it causes an old meaning of a word to become useless, because people confuse it with the new meaning. In this case we are talking about a rather arcane word being co-opted from philosophers by information scientists. There's little reason to use the word in general conversation, and little chance that either of the two groups above will confuse the word or use it sloppily.

Now, the abuse of the word 'enormity' is a different story altogether...

Re:Computer Engineering == Economics?

[p3d0]

Computer science (and mathematics) has a long history of redefining common words. You have "assemble" and "compile", "class" and "type" and "method" and "code", "file" and "string", "stack" and "heap" and "hash", and so on. None of these has their original english meaning when used in computer science.

Little help people

[Henry V .009]

Anybody know how to turn the volume down on a bullshit dectector? My eardrums are bleeding, I swear.

I have priorities

[L. VeGas]

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

Re:I have priorities

[sql*kitten]

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

It's a way to leverage the synergy of paradigms.

Or in otherwords, the CS equivalent of management consultant bullshit.

This is what happens

[nosferatu-man]

... 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

Re:WTF is an Ontology?

[HughsOnFirst]

At first blush, I'd guess that "ontology" editors would change my "ontology".
Something like a concussion , a nasty hangover , hallucinogenic drugs or maybe a graduate degree?
Oh wait, maybe this is for editing other peoples "ontologies" ? Maybe some sort of religious war is involved?

But seriously, This looks like good stuff with a terrible name,

Ontology:

[charlie763]

"Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913)"
Ontology On*tol"o*gy, n. Gr. ? the things which exist
(pl.neut. of ?, ?, being, p. pr. of ? to be) + -logy: cf.F.
ontologie.
That department of the science of metaphysics which
investigates and explains the nature and essential properties
and relations of all beings, as such, or the principles and
causes of being.


I still don't get it...

Heh

[4of12]

At least they're developing something useful!

For a while, I was afraid they were developing ways for studying tautology!

Simple Explanation

[moc.tfosorcimgllib]

A simple computer ontology builds abstract relationships between objects.

Animals -> Birds -> Flightless Birds -> Penguins
It is an important first step into AI and computer interaction.
Unfortunately I found the article as useful as those old programs where the computer would try and guess what you were thinking about.

RTFA

[panurge]

OK, the article is a bit vague, because it is aimed at people who kind of know what an ontology is already, and it is really just an overview of the current state of the art.

However, I found it useful if only for one part, where they talk about ontology construction. If you read it, it looks just like a systems analysis job slightly rephrased. Find out what the entities are, establish the relationships between entities, logicalise, rationalise, and finally populate the resulting structures. There, that wasn't so hard, was it?

It looks to my simple and fast ageing mind as if we end up with something like a DFD in which data stores are replaced by sets and data flows are replaced by relationships, and I have no idea at all what happens with processes. Having done a bit of KB work in the late 80s and then failed totally to keep up with the field, I'd like to know more at a practical level, but without having to understand medical applications. Anybody got any good links?

Missing information

[webmaven]

For some reason, the table doesn't list the license or price of any of the surveyed tools. Only one tool even has the phrase 'open-source' in it's 'Notes' column. One other says 'source available', and a third seems to be hosted on sourceforge.net. Should I simply assume that the rest of these tools are proprietary?

Given the fact that I am (on occasion) willing to part with my $$$ for software if necessary, I definitely would have liked to see pricing information included in this table, if only to rule out those tools which are out of my price-range.