An good introductory article about ontology development was cited in our new weekly newsletter ShelfLife recently: Ontology Development 101: A Guide to Creating Your First Ontology, by Natalya F. Noy and Deborah L. McGuinness.
They use an example wine ontology to explain the generic ontology design principles in a clear & understandable way. Perhaps we should consider having a separate (and easy-to-find) section on the CRM-SIG website for introductory and tutorial type materials and links. Since these folks are just down the road at Stanford, I'll drop them a line and let them know about the CRM work. Cheers, T. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Tony Gill <> [email protected] Research Libraries Group <> http://www.rlg.org/ 1200 Villa Street, Mountain View, CA 94041 USA Voice: +1 (650) 691-2304 <> Fax: +1 (650) 964-1461 ----- Forwarded by Tony Gill/RLG on 25/07/2001 02:11 PM ----- "RLG" <[email protected]> Sent by: [email protected] 28/06/2001 07:33 AM Please respond to "Editors" To: "Multiple recipients of ShelfLife" <[email protected]> cc: Subject: ShelfLife, No. 8 (28 June 2001) ShelfLife, No. 8 (28 June 2001) ************************************************************* ShelfLife, a weekly executive news summary for information professionals, is a free service of RLG, the not-for-profit membership corporation of more than 160 universities, national libraries, archives, museums -- and other institutions with remarkable collections for research and learning. RLG was created in 1974 as the Research Libraries Group. ShelfLife provides context for RLG's major initiatives, which celebrate the power of knowledge to grow, to live, and to last. ************************************************************* CONTENT MANAGEMENT New Specification Enhances XML Ontology Guide Available Online LONG-TERM RETENTION Digital Technology Brings Dinosaurs to Life The Coming Convergence of Documents and Content RESOURCE SHARING Keeping Librarians Relevant The P2P Community is Growing Shared Access Technologies Enhance Working Options New Weapons in the Fight to Protect Intellectual Property New DRM Demands Interoperability Standards OTHER REFERENCE POINTS OF INTEREST 'America's Chronicles' to Preserve Newspaper History Promise of Electronic Books Finally Becoming Reality >>>>>>>CONTENT MANAGEMENT NEW SPECIFICATION ENHANCES XML The versatile and widely used extensible markup language (XML) is getting more powerful and more versatile with the impending release of the XML schema language, used for describing the legal structure, content and constraints of XML documents. While the specification hasn't been finalized yet, it promises to greatly enhance XML. Structured somewhat like the data definition language (DDL) that's used in setting up relational databases, it provides a framework for the various elements and attributes of an XML document. And it is more powerful and comprehensive than document type definition (DTD). Unlike DTDs, the XML schema language provides the rich data typing associated with ordinary programming languages and defines several different built-in data types, such as string, integer, boolean, date and time. It also allows for defining new types. Developers can use these built-in as well as user-defined data types to effectively define and constrain XML document attributes and element values. Another key feature is that it supports inheritance, allowing users to create new schemas by deriving features from existing ones, as well as override derived features when new ones are required. This encourages software reuse and helps developers avoid building everything from scratch again and again. It significantly improves XML software development process, code maintainability and programmer productivity. (Computer.org Mar-Apr 2001) http://computer.org/itpro/homepage/Mar_Apr01/roy/index.htm ONTOLOGY GUIDE AVAILABLE ONLINE More and more organizations and disciplines of study are creating their own ontologies for more efficient Web searches. Among other benefits, ontologies -- explicit formal specifications of the terms in the domain and relations among them -- allow users to share a common understanding of the structure of information among people or software agents. Ontologies may be highly specific, such as those in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and medicine, or created for more general usage. For example, the United Nations Development Program and Dun & Bradstreet combined efforts to develop the UNSPSC ontology, which provides terminology for products and services. To help sort out the whys and hows, two Stanford University authors have published something of a beginner's guide to creating a useful and usable ontology (available at the URL below). The guide describes an ontology-development methodology for declarative frame-based systems (they used Protege 2000), lists steps in the development process and addresses the complex issues of defining class hierarchies and properties of classes and instances. The authors note there is no single correct ontology for any domain. Ontology design is a creative process and no two ontologies designed by different people would be the same. The potential applications and a designer's understanding and view of the domain will undoubtedly affect ontology design choices. (Ontology Development 101: A Guide to Creating Your First Ontology, Stanford University) http://www.ksl.stanford.edu/people/dlm/papers/ontology-tutorial-noy-mcguinness.htm << Rest of this ShelfLife newsletter cut; to read back issues or subscribe, go to: http://lists2.rlg.org/cgi-bin/lyris.pl?enter=shelflife-from-rlg >>
