| Term | Ontology | Comments |
|---|
| Business Rule Design | SWRL | In the late 1980's I had a hard time teaching Business Strategy, MIS, Expert Systems and Policy Audit classes to MBA students. My sense is that with all of the conceptual mapping tools, and the evolving ontology development/editing tools today, the problem of educating/exposing executives to ontology based policy would be much easier. A recent PhD dissertation by R.G., Vice President of Security for a large bank, reinforces this notion. Getting high level enterprise policy aligned with employee reward systems and middle management resource allocation processes seems like a good thing, as long as the rules and the rules for rule making are open and trust-worthy. [Bob Smith, Ph.D.] |
| Classification | International Classification of Diseases Version 10 (ICD-10) | The ICD has become the international standard diagnostic classification for all general epidemiological and many health management purposes. These include the analysis of the general health situation of population groups and monitoring of the incidence and prevalence of diseases and other health problems in relation to other variables such as the characteristics and circumstances of the individuals affected. It is used to classify diseases and other health problems recorded on many types of health and vital records including death certificates and hospital records. In addition to enabling the storage and retrieval of diagnostic information for clinical and epidemiological purposes, these records also provide the basis for the compilation of national mortality and morbidity statistics by WHO Member States. [Ken Baclawski] |
| Concept system | Principles of terminology | |
| Content Models | various - CMC model, iPlayer model, PIPs model | CMC content model is built in Protege, hence the increased likelihood of being called an ontology. Main issues are around over-complexity given the business needs and creation of multiple overlapping models that are inconsistent with each other. [Karen Loasby] |
| Controlled Terminology | SNOMED-CT | |
| controlled vocabulary / thesaurus | Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) Metathesaurus | NLM itself does not use the word ontology to refer to the UMLS Metathesaurus, but more and more of its users do. [Olivier Bodenreider] |
| Controlled vocabulary thesaurus | Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) | The MeSH thesaurus is used by NLM for indexing articles from 4,800 of the world's leading biomedical journals for the MEDLINE/PubMED database. It is also used for the NLM-produced database that includes cataloging of books, documents, and audiovisuals acquired by the Library. Each bibliographic reference is associated with a set of MeSH terms that describe the content of the item. Similarly, search queries use MeSH vocabulary to find items on a desired topic. [Ken Baclawski] |
| Entity Relationship Model/Data Model | ISO 15926-2 | Entity relationship models have roughly the same expressivity as Description Logics. Entity Relationship models are ontologies, but many practitioners are not aware that what they are really doing is ontology, and as a result many of them are not very good ontologies. But a bad ontology is still an ontology. This sort of ontology is easily the most widespread, and has the biggest impact on business and commerce since SQL databases run the worlds economy. [Matthew West] |
| First Order Logic Ontology | SUMO | Well I made this term up to clarify one sort of ontology. Ontologies of this sort are normally targeting at some sort of reasoning, rather than for instance database design. [Matthew West] |
| Folksonomy | CMC user tags | |
| Social Bookmarking tags | Often - for defining interfaces for portals or collaboration spaces - it is said that we need to enable folksonomies rather than create controlled vocabularies like "ontologies" [Lisa Dawn Colvin] |
| Hierarchical Taxonomy | Enterprise Topic Classification Scheme | Topic maps are typically the products of dynamic statistical clustering. This is actually a rule-based topic classification scheme which we use to programmatically classify content. This is used in either search or browsing. Can also be used to support syndication. [Denise Bedford] |
| Library Classification schemes | Universal Decimal Classification; Colon Classification | Faceted classification is nearer to the concept of ontologies. Faceted classification scheme is designed to express the basic structure of the thought content of a document in standard way, instead of just enumerating a group of subject classes. [Nabonita Guha] |
| logical theory, upper ontology | DOLCE | |
| SUMO | |
| Metadata | ISO/IEC 11179 - Metadata registries | This standard specifies a framework for recording and managing the semantics of data. [Dan Gillman] |
| Metadata Scheme | World Bank Core Metadata Strategy | What people sometimes refer to as 'faceted' structures when properly formed is actually a metadata scheme, each facet of which may have its own distinct behavior and structures. There is a need to bring together the people who talk about 'metadata' and the people who talk about 'faceted search'. They using different terms but meaning the same thing. There are discrepancies in business rules applied to each one, though. [Denise Bedford] |
| Metathesaurus | Unified Medical Language System Metathesaurus | The Metathesaurus is a very large, multi-purpose, and multi-lingual vocabulary database that contains information about biomedical and health related concepts, their various names, and the relationships among them. Designed for use by system developers, the Metathesaurus is built from the electronic versions of various thesauri, classifications, code sets, and lists of controlled terms used in patient care, health services billing, public health statistics, indexing and cataloging biomedical literature, and/or basic, clinical, and health services research. These are referred to as the "source vocabularies" of the Metathesaurus. [Ken Baclawski] |
| Model | Version 0.5, 25 July 2006 | Term is found in the Terminology section of the public specification. Term is widely used by the target community (system architects) to describe other things. [Carl Mattocks] |
| Network Taxonomy (sometimes called semantic network or thesaurus) | World Bank MetaThesaurus | Leveraged in topic classification, used to support search (equivalent terms for synonym expansion), other relationships for suggesting other search terms. [Denise Bedford] |
| nomenclature | ISO/IEEE 11073-10101 | Cited as a medical device interoperability standard (ISO/IEEE 11073), the nomenclature section is touted by the developers as the key to semantic interoperability. The standard has not been widely implemented and is not in any format that is computable. [Kathy Lesh] |
| Object Information Model | OIM (just started) | An OIM is not a separate entity, but a dynamic collection of pointers to templates in which a particular class in involved. [Hans Teijgeler] |
| Ontology | Pizza Ontology | standard tutorial [Doug Holmes] |
| SNOMED CT | Although SNOMED CT is built using description logics, I do not consider it a 'true' ontology. It has too many compound (precoordinated) concepts. It does not have natural language text definitions. It is inconsistently modeled. SNOMED CT is trying to be too many things to too many people/groups. [Kathy Lesh] |
| Gene Ontology (GO) | The GO project has developed three structured controlled vocabularies (ontologies) that describe gene products in terms of their associated biological processes, cellular components and molecular functions in a species-independent manner. There are three separate aspects to this effort: first, the development and maintenance of the ontologies themselves; second, the annotation of gene products, which entails making associations between the ontologies and the genes and gene products in the collaborating databases; and third, development of tools that facilitate the creation, maintenance and use of ontologies. [Ken Baclawski] |
| Sequence Ontology (SO) | The Sequence Ontology Project (SO) is a joint effort by genome annotation centres, including: WormBase, the Berkeley Drosophila Genome Project, FlyBase, the Mouse Genome Informatics group, and the Sanger Institute, We are a part of the Gene Ontology Project and our aim is to develop an ontology suitable for describing biological sequences. [Ken Baclawski] |
| Bayesian Web | The Bayesian Web is a proposal to add reasoning about certainty to the Semantic Web [Ken Baclawski] |
| DOLCE | This term and definition is applied in all worlds of semantic interoperability, knowledge engineering, systems architecture and engineering. It is believed that this definition is the only one (that I know of) that reflects the necessary conceptualizations (e.g. intensional vs. extensional conceptualization) required for addressing semantic interoperability issues in SOA, e-commerce, federated systems, standards bodies, etc. etc. It has been used to help characterize sources of error for semantic interoperability and for the creation of semantic interoperability measures, with measurement theory. It has been used in the context of other terms of interest where the associated artifacts of these terms, e.g. taxonomy, may be used in a ontology lifecycle methodology as preliminary artifacts in the process of creating the final product - an ontology. The definition, actually the "Guarino School of Ontology" is being used as a part of a formal grounding for an (Inter-)Enterprise Systems (general systems-theoretic sense) Theory merging technology, knowledge, law, economics, communication(s) etc. [Matthew K. Hettinger] |
| OWL | |
| ontology (computer science) | all of the ontologies built using Protege | |
| OWL Ontology | OWL version of ISO 15926-2 | I don't like OWL much, but there it is. There are lots of questions about how to use OWL to represent complex ontological (philosophical) problems. There are also questions about which version of OWL to use. [Matthew West] |
| Reference Model | OASIS RM for SOA | |
| Ring Taxonomy (synonyms) | ISO Country Names, ISO Languages, World Bank currency names | Ontologists may argue about country names, currency names, etc. but the groups that maintain these lists would rarely consider them to be an ontology or even a component of an ontology. [Denise Bedford] |
| schema (??) | ISO 10303 (STEP) | I find this section/these sections confusing and I'm not sure what to enter. The instructions are not clear. [William Burkett] |
| Semantic data model | Conceptual (semantic) entity relationship model | |
| Semantic network | UMLS Semantic Network | The purpose of the Semantic Network is to provide a consistent categorization of all concepts represented in the UMLS Metathesaurus and to provide a set of useful relationships between these concepts. [Ken Baclawski] |
| Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) Semantic Network | Of the 3 knowledge sources in the UMLS, the Semantic Network is the closest to an ontology. It has been proposed as an upper-level ontology for the biomedical domain. [Olivier Bodenreider] |
| Taxonomy | CMC Controlled Vocabularies | used in automatic indexing to describe content, then used to generate navigation between related content. We would like to add more advanced semantic relationships so we can 'type' the relationships [Karen Loasby] |
| NICE Taxonomy Scheme | |
| Thesaurus | Controlled Health Thesaurus | Originally developed to tag CDC web pages to improve search and retrieval. CDC changed web search strategies and the thesaurus is being used by some in CDC to tag internal documents. The structure was changed from a MeSH model to an IS-A taxonomy with the intent to grow to an ontology. Funding was cut. CDC is putting efforts into building 'value sets'. The thesaurus has the potential to be the glue to link the value sets as well as assist with discovery and decision support - if it were funded. [Kathy Lesh] |
| National Agricultural Library Thesaurus (NALT) | Online vocabulary look-up tool for agricultural and biological terms [Ken Baclawski] |
| upper ontology | BFO (Basic Formal Ontology) | I will list the Upper Ontology artifacts represented at the Upper Ontology Summit 2006 here. [Peter Yim] |
| | NeuroML | |
| Joint Warfare Simulation Object Library | Provides a strong taxonomical structure (based on a heirarchy divided up into broad conceptual areas of agent, physical, and event entities). Lacks a method for formally capturing "meaning" of entities, and is very limited in scope in that it only addresses elements of specific interest to the domain of Joint Warfare simulation, and only from a U.S.-centric perspective. Atomic concepts required for such a simulation are missing, as are other perspectives relative to the domain. [Charles Turnitsa] |
| CPT (Current Procedural Terminology) | CPT (Current Procedural Terminology) CPT is a registered trademark of the American Medical Association http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/category/3113.html http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/category/3882.html (Background) [Ed Dodds] |
| ICD-9 | The International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision, Clinical Modification (ICD-9-CM) is based on the World Health Organization's Ninth Revision, International Classification of Diseases (ICD-9). ICD-9-CM is the official system of assigning codes to diagnoses and procedures associated with hospital utilization in the United States. The ICD-9 is used to code and classify mortality data from death certificates. The ICD-9-CM consists of: a tabular list containing a numerical list of the disease code numbers in tabular form; an alphabetical index to the disease entries; and a classification system for surgical, diagnostic, and therapeutic procedures (alphabetic index and tabular list). http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/about/otheract/icd9/abticd9.htm [Ed Dodds] |
| Process Specification Language | PSL is a formal ontology axiomatized in Common Logic. It is applied to support semantic integration among process-related software applications, and it is also applied to support automated reasoning (such as verification of the consistency of business processes and web service discovery) [Michael Gruninger] |
| DOLCE | DOLCE : a Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering [Peter Yim] |
| DOLCE - D & S | DOLCE - Description & Situation extensions [Peter Yim] |
| GUM (generalized upper model) | |
| ISO 15926-2 | ISO/FDIS 15926-2 - Lifecycle integration of process plant data including oil and gas production facilities [Peter Yim] |
| OpenCYC | |
| PSL / ISO 18629 | PSL - Process Specification Language [Peter Yim] |
| SUMO | SUMO - Suggested Upper Merged Ontology [Peter Yim] |
| wordnet | |
| Semantic MediaWiki | ref. Ontolog event: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ConferenceCall_2006_08_17 [Peter Yim (2)] |
| Dublin Core | Metadata elements for describing documents. It is widely used to describe digital materials such as video, sound, image, text, and composite media like web pages. [Ken Baclawski (2)] |
| FOAF ("Friend-of-a-friend") vocabulary specification | FOAF is both a project for Web social networks and a vocabulary for social networking [Ken Baclawski (2)] |