Synonyms
Business catalogues; Controlled vocabularies; Faceted classifications; Taxonomies; Thesauri; Topic hierarchies; User classifications; Web directories
Definition
Ontologies are explicit specifications of conceptualizations [7]. They are often thought of as directed graphs whose nodes represent concepts and whose edges represent relations between concepts. The notion of a concept is understood as defined in Knowledge Representation, i.e., as a set of objects or individuals [2]. This set is called the concept extension or the concept interpretation. Concepts are often lexically defined, i.e., they have natural language names which are used to describe the concept extensions (e.g., concept motherdenotes the set of all female parents). Therefore, when ontologies are visualized, their nodes are often shown with corresponding natural language concept names. The backbone structure of the ontology graph is a taxonomy in which the relations are “is-a,” whereas the remaining structure...
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Giunchiglia, F., Zaihrayeu, I. (2018). Lightweight Ontologies. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_1314
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_1314
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