An Introduction to ISO 15926 November 2011 - iRINGToday

Ontology of
Things That
Will Carry a
Bicycle
Pickup Truck
Pickup Truck with a
Camper that is not full
of stuff
F150
Felicia Fun
Fig. 2.4 Ontology of things that will carry a bicycle.
Similarly, when we use a machine-readable ontology to organize and store information we
make it possible for machines to make inferences. If two applications use the same ontology
to store information it will be much easier for them to exchange information, and to preserve
the meaning of the information during the exchange.
There has been a great deal of study on the subject of ontologies in an effort to implement
the vision of the Semantic Web. A number of tools have been developed to make it easier to
create and share ontologies. One of the more important of these is OWL, which is being incorporated
into Part 8 of ISO 15926.
Open Ways to Store and Exchange Data
For machines to be able to understand what data means, we need to see how to store data in
a way that retains its meaning without being dependent on proprietary software or short-lived
hardware. Since the invention of writing at about 3000 B.C., people have used all manner of
what we now call hard copy to record information. The Library of Alexandria, which burned
down in 48 B.C., according to one account, 2 is an example of the best technology for managing
information in hard-copy form and of a major limitation of doing so. With the advent of
computer-managed storage in the mid twentieth century, information managers have had to
grapple with two problems.
• Survival of information beyond the lifetime of proprietary hardware and software
• Moving a large amount of information between proprietary systems
A typical example of these types of questions is a help desk inquiry from the
mid 1980s.
2 Look up “Library of Alexandra” in Wikipedia.
CHAPTER 2
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