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A foundation ontology is a core glossary in whose terms everything else must be described, like the 2000 words of English required by Longman's dictionary to define the 4000 most common English idioms. It serves as core ontology for computer programs and users both, influencing their view of data and events.
By default, all computer programs have a foundation ontology consisting of a processor instruction set, or standard library in a programming language, or files in accessible file systems, or some other list of 'what exists'. Because these may be poor representations for certain problem domain s, more specialized schema must be created to make the data useful in making real world decisions. Thus the need for standards which take 'core' (e.g. the Dublin core in SGML) ontologies and solidify them into 'foundations':
T. R. Gruber has described an ontology in this sense as "an explicit specification of conceptualization".Although the term 'ontology' has been used very loosely to label almost any conceptual classification scheme, among practising computational ontologists, a true ontology should contain at a minimum not only a hierarchy of concepts organized by the subsumption relation (often called ' isa', 'subtype' or 'subclass'), but other 'semantic relations' that specify how one concept is related to another. The most common of the semantic relations other than subsumption is the 'part-of' relation. In one formal notation, one might see a relation such as (isPartOf Spine Vertebrate), meaning that a 'Spine' (in that specific sense) is part of a Vertebrate. The ontologies are organized by concepts, not words, so that the concept 'spine' referring to the spine of a book would have to be labeled by a different term, such as 'BookSpine'.
This is different from but related to the philosophical meaning of the word ontology, the study of existence. The purpose of a computational ontology is not to specify what does or does not 'exist', but to create a database, which is a human artifact, containing concepts referring to entities of interest to the ontologist, and which will be useful in performing certain types of computations. For this reason, the abstruse reasoning used by philosophical ontologists can be helpful in recognizing and avoiding potential logical ambiguities, but where alternative ontological representations can equally well serve the pragmatic purpose of the computational ontologist, time constraints usually dictate that one choice is made and others are ignored. For certain purposes, it can be better to ignore many of the details of the objects of interest. As a result, computational ontologies developed independently for different purposes will often differ greatly from each other.
Ontologies are commonly used in artificial intelligence and knowledge representationKnowledge representation is needed for library classification and for processing concepts in an information system. In the field of artificial intelligence, problem solving can be simplified by an appropriate choice of knowledge representation . Represent. Computer programA computer program (often simply called a program is an example of computer software that prescribes the actions (" computations") that are to be carried out by a computer. Most programs consist of a loadable set of instructions which determines how the cs can use an ontology for a variety of purposes including inductive reasoning, classificationClassification may refer to: Taxonomic classification the act of placing an object or concept into a set of categories (such as a taxonomy or a subject index), based on the properties of the object or concept. A person may classify the object or concept a, a variety of problem solvingProblem solving forms part of thinking. It occurs if an organism or an artificial intelligence system does not know how to proceed from a given state to a desired goal state. The nature of human problem solving has been studied by psychologists over the p techniques, as well as to facilitate communication and sharing of information between different systems.
An ontology which is not tied to a particular problem domain but attempts to describe general entities is known as a foundation ontology or upper ontology. Typically, more specialized schema must be created to make the data useful for real world decisions.
Such ontologies are commercially valuable, creating competition to define them. Peter Murray-Rust has claimed that this leads to "semantic and ontological warfare due to competing standards", and accordingly any standard foundation ontology is likely to be contested among commercial or political parties, each with their own idea of 'what exists' (in the philosophical sense). No one upper ontology has yet gained widespread acceptance as a de factoDe facto is a Latin expression that means "in fact" or "in practice", commonly used as opposed to de jure (meaning "by law") when referring to matters of law or governance or technique (such as standards), that are found in the common experience as create standard. Different organizations are attempting to define standards for specific domains. The ' Process Specification Language ' (PSL) created by the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) is one example.
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