Ontology Language

An ontology language is an artificial language that expresses knowledge about the structure of human communication and that is suitable to express additional communicative facts, using that knowledge. An ontology language provides:

1. Conceptual phenomena with their names and textual definitions.
2. Conceptual relations with their names and textual definitions.
3. Conceptual roles that are required by those conceptual relations with their names and textual definitions.
4. The concepts which members can play the above conceptual roles (in those conceptual relations).
5. The specialization relation between each concept and its direct supertype concept.

whereas conceptual phenomenon, conceptual relation or conceptual role are subtypes of concept.

A communicative fact is an opinion about a potential fact. It is expressed in such an ontology language as a concatenation of an intention and a proposition.

For example

Assume that person P makes a statement that wheel-1 is part of car-1 and person Q denies that. These two communicative facts express opinions about what might be the case. In an ontology language this can be expressed as follows:

• P: statement: wheel-1 'is part of' car-1
• Q: denial:wheel-1 'is part of' car-1

In this example, the following knowledge shall be included in the ontology language to enable a correct interpretation of the meaning:

• There is a concept that is called (in English) 'is part of'.
• The 'is part of' conceptual relation is a specialization of the concept 'relation'.
• The 'is part of' requires a conceptual role-1 called 'part'.
• The 'is part of' requires a conceptual role-2 called 'whole'.
• Conceptual role 'part' can be played by an 'individual object'.
• Conceptual role 'whole' can be played by an 'individual object'.
• The conceptual phenomenum 'individual object' is a specialization of 'anything'.
• The concepts 'statement' and 'denial' are specializations of 'intention'.

With such an ontology language it is possible to express any opinion about a composition, including the above example.

An example of a more complete ontology language is called Gellish. It is defined in the STEPlib tables on http://www.STEPlib.com, especially in the TOPini part. In my opinion such an ontology language provides a universal data structure and can replace data models by one common language.

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IEEE Standard Upper Ontology (SUO) Study Group http://suo.ieee.org/ and the Suggested Upper Merged Ontology http://www.ontologyportal.org which is one of its proposals

OWL (WebOntologyLanguage) is a W3C Candidate Recommendation, designed to support ontologies distributed on the Web, using RDF (ResourceDescriptionFramework). http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-guide/

Google directory: ontologies http://directory.google.com/Top/Reference/Knowledge_Management/Knowledge_Representation/Ontologies/

Most likely quaintly stale-dated and not much use for anything but printing out to start the coal fire to warm the hob but a few little gems might be of interest to a few old souls or a few young ones too.

See:: http://ksl-web.stanford.edu/KR96/PanelIntro.html

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This used to end with:

        . . . . . . . . . ( end of section Syntax) <<Contents | End>> 

and many lines have extra spaces. The syntax was odd, and clearly not generated for this wiki. The conclusion is that this was simply lifted from somewhere else and dropped here.

People, if you do simply lift and drop, it would be GoodForm? to take a moment to enhance the information by using appropriate WikiMarkup.

Thank you.

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CategorySemanticWeb