An ontology is a description (like a formal specification of a program) of concepts and relationships that can exist for an agent or a community of agents. The concept is important for the purpose of enabling knowledge sharing and reuse. The Handbook on Ontologies provides a comprehensive overview of the current status and future prospectives of the field of ontologies. The handbook demonstrates standards that have been created recently, it surveys methods that have been developed and it shows how to bring both into practice of ontology infrastructures and applications that are the best of their kind.

Inhalt

I Ontology Representation and Reasoning.- 1 Description Logics.- 2 Ontologies in F-logic.- 3 The Resource Description Framework (RDF) and its Vocabulary Description Language RDFS.- 4 Web Ontology Language: OWL.- 5 An Ontology-Composition Algebra.- II Ontology Engineering.- 6 On-To-Knowledge Methodology (OTKM).- 7 Building a Very Large Ontology from Medical Thesauri.- 8 An Overview of OntoClean.- 9 Ontology Learning.- 10 Knowledge Patterns.- 11 Ontology and the Lexicon.- 12 Ontology Reconciliation.- 13 Ontology Evaluation.- 14 Ontology Engineering Environments.- III Ontology Infrastructure.- 15 An Extensible Ontology Software Environment.- 16 Ontologies in Support of Problem Solving.- 17 Ontologies in Agent Architectures.- 18 Tools for Mapping and Merging Ontologies.- 19 Ontology Matching: A Machine Learning Approach.- 20 Retrieving and Exploring Ontology-based Information.- 21 Supporting User Tasks through Visualisation of Light-weight Ontologies.- IV Ontology Applications.- 22 Ontologies for Knowledge Management.- 23 Ontology-based Content Management in a Virtual Organization.- 24 Ontology-based Recommender Systems.- 25 The Knowledge Portal "OntoWeb".- 26 Ontologies and Hypertext.- 27 Semantic Layering with Magpie.- 28 Ontologies and Metadata for eLearning.- 29 Ontology of the Process Specification Language.- 30 The Role of Ontologies in eCommerce.- 31 An Ontology-based Platform for Semantic Interoperability.- 32 Ontologies in Bioinformatics.- Author Index.