Thursday, July 15, 2004

XML.com: Ontology Tools Survey, Revisited

XML.com: Ontology Tools Survey, Revisited: "Ontologies are a way of specifying the structure of domain knowledge in a formal logic designed for machine processing. The effect on information technology (IT) is to shift the burden of capturing the meaning of data content from the procedural operations of algorithms and rules to the representation of the data itself.

Opening the International Semantic Web Conference in 2003, the conference chair Jim Hendler declared that 'a little semantics goes a long way.' The belief being that infusing even a little semantic quality into our data (residing in web pages, database tables, electronic documents, or whatever) can mean that data is more immediately, broadly, and profoundly usable by all applications aware of the knowledge-representation scheme -- the ontology.

For such reasons, there is a growing sense among researchers and practitioners that ontologies will play an important role in forthcoming information-management solutions. Several conditions predicate this current state of affairs."