Ontologies Vs. Formats Vs. Schema Vs. APIs

Ontologies Vs. Formats Vs. Schema Vs. APIs: Tom Gruber thinks that "ontologies are a technology to make a minimal commitment while being as clear as possible. The minimalism comes by abstracting away from implementation details, which are biased by needs of efficiency and convenience. The clarity comes from careful specification, with at least some of the specification document couched in a formal language that forces one to be explicit about assumptions and the meanings of terms."

Towards a Canonical Method to Solve Patterns of Ontology Modeling Issues (9 Month Report)

Towards a Canonical Method to Solve Patterns of Ontology Modeling Issues (9 Month Report: "This report presents a brief description of the different activities carried out in the field of ontology engineering. It identifies a lack of guidelines on how to address modeling issues during the ontology conceptualization phase, in the current methodologies to build ontologies from scratch. It describes an example scenario of an ontology modeling task and it proposes a possible solution inspired by folksonomy based systems and faceted classification. This is followed by a study of the difficulties found to adapt the IEEE Learning Object Metadata (LOM) standard to model an ontology fit for purpose in a specific university curricula domain. It also gives an example of a prototype for a potential next generation semantic web application and a brief summary of the main viewpoints that will characterize such applications. Finally it outlines possible paths of further research to address ontology modeling issues and it suggests looking at various sources for possible solutions (schemes of folksonomy and faceted classification, design principles of object-oriented and relational database applications, and ontology evaluation).