Ontologies are powering the next generation of knowledge management and semantic interoperability solutions. Ontologies are active models of information that are like and unlike other models used in the information technology:
- Like databases ontologies are used by applications at run time (queried and reasoned over)
- Unlike databases, relationships in the ontologies are ‘first-class’ constructs, have rich semantics and are used globally
- Like object models ontologies describe classes and attributes (properties)
- Unlike object models, ontologies are set-based
- Like business rules ontologies encode rules
- Unlike business rules, ontologies organize rules using class structures
- Like XML schemas ontologies are native to the web (and can be serialized in XML)
- Unlike XML schemas, ontologies are graphs, not trees and are used for reasoning
How are ontologies being used in the business solutions? An ontology is ultimately concerned with the consistency and accuracy of communication:
- Between organizations and people, misinterpretations in communications can be addressed by ontologies that explain and reconcile terminology, jargon, and nomenclature specific to each party.
- Between systems, ontologies reconcile metadata standards, XML dialects, and database access mechanisms. Acting as a semantic translator, ontologies insulate each system from changes that might occur on each side of the interface.
With the advent of Semantic Web, we now have W3C standard, web-native languages for expressing ontology models supported by a growing number of vendors and tools:
- RDF (Resource Description Framework)
- OWL (Web Ontology Language)
TopQuadrant provides the expertise for designing ontologies and ontology based solutions. We actively participate in the standard development activities. Our Knowledge Engineers/Ontology Modelers:
- Bring extensive experience using modeling techniques, tools and methodologies
- Are skilled in leading knowledge acquisition sessions
- Are experts in formal logic, set theory and semantic standards such as RDF, OWL, SPARQL and Rules
- Offers comprehensive knowledge of select ontology development and deployment platform
|
 |
|
