In recent years the development of
ontologies—explicit formal specifications of the terms in the domain and relations
among them
(Gruber 1993)—has
been moving from the realm of Artificial-Intelligence laboratories to the desktops of
domain experts. Ontologies have become common on the World-Wide Web. The ontologies on the
Web range from large taxonomies categorizing Web sites (such as on Yahoo!) to
categorizations of products for sale and their features (such as on Amazon.com). The WWW
Consortium (W3C) is developing the Resource Description Framework
(Brickley and Guha 1999), a language
for encoding knowledge on Web pages to make it understandable to electronic agents
searching for information.
The Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), in conjunction with the W3C, is developing
DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML) by extending RDF with more expressive constructs aimed
at facilitating agent interaction on the Web
(Hendler and McGuinness 2000). Many
disciplines now develop standardized ontologies that domain experts can use to share and
annotate information in their fields. Medicine, for example, has produced large,
standardized, structured vocabularies such as
snomed
(Price and Spackman 2000) and
the semantic network of the Unified Medical Language System
(Humphreys and Lindberg 1993). Broad
general-purpose ontologies are emerging as well. For example,
the United Nations Development Program and Dun
& Bradstreet combined their efforts to develop the UNSPSC ontology which provides
terminology for products and services (
www.unspsc.org).
An ontology defines a common
vocabulary for researchers who need to share information in a domain. It includes
machine-interpretable definitions of basic concepts in the domain and relations among
them.