Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

Sign up for GitHub

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Jump to bottom

ontology disambiguation. Technically the same as schema, different connotations #2

Open
wants to merge 2 commits into
base: main
Choose a base branch
from
Open

ontology disambiguation. Technically the same as schema, different connotations #2

Changes from all commits
Commits
Show all changes
2 commits
Select commit Hold shift + click to select a range
ccc9a02
Update ontology.md
kilojoules Dec 15, 2022
85b7ca9
Merge branch 'main' into patch-1
thclark Dec 16, 2022
File filter

Filter by extension

Filter by extension
Conversations
Failed to load comments.
Loading
Jump to
Jump to file
Failed to load files.
Loading
Diff view
Diff view
10 changes: 9 additions & 1 deletion terms/ontology.md
View file
Open in desktop
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -37,11 +37,19 @@ Example: OWL Ontology Language is based on Description Logics, OWL Ontology cons

</details>

{% hint style="warning" %}
**Disambiguation**
An ontology is technically equivalent to a schema. Both are formal specifications of some conceptualisation or abstract world model.

From its usage in the Semantic Web community and the broader knowledge-based systems community, the term 'schema' is used to refer to simple conceptualisations, as might be written using less expressive knowledge representation languages such as RDF Schema (so making explicit the relationship between ontologies and database schemas). Conversely, the term 'ontology' is taken to describe more complex models, written in more expressive languages (OWL, DAML+OIL, Ontolingua, KIF, etc).

There is a school of thought that considers ontologies to contain rule-based knowledge in addition to a relational characterisation, but this is far less prevalent in the SW community than elsewhere.
Comment on lines +42 to +46
Copy link
Contributor

Choose a reason for hiding this comment

The reason will be displayed to describe this comment to others. Learn more.

You say in a comment this is taken from https://www.w3.org/wiki/SchemaVsOntology but haven't referred to that anywhere - please include a hyperlink to this source reference.

Copy link
Contributor Author

Choose a reason for hiding this comment

The reason will be displayed to describe this comment to others. Learn more.

I'm not sure what the best way to link this is. Should I put all the text in quotes?

{% endhint %}

{% hint style="info" %} *Note
{% hint style="info" %} **Note**

It can be useful to classify ontologies as being designed to deal with an open world or closed world. In other words, whether or not the content of the ontology is modular.

Formally, the open and closed world ontologies can be described as "assertion box" \[[Reiter, 1980](https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/322186.322189)] \[[Brodie, 2012](https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4612-5196-5) and "terminology box" \[[Lutz, 2012](http://www.informatik.uni-bremen.de/tdki/research/papers/2012/LutSeyWo-DL12.pdf). The assertion box is essentially a database, which expresses member assertions. The terminology box is designed for modular schema, specifying concepts and relations. Using this encoded knowledge many diverse databases can be queried using the same semantics. It is possible to represent subclass relationships ($\subseteq$) and equivalence ($\equiv$), conjunction ($\cap$), disjunction ($\cup$), negation ($\neg$), property restrictions ($\forall$, $\exists$), tautology ($\top$), and contradiction ($\bot$).

{% endhint %}