Innovation and Ontologies

158 Deployment in Business
2.3.3 Evaluation
The ontologies presented above have in common that they have on the one hand a scientific
character which classifies them as potentially powerful, but on the other hand they are not useful
for all kinds of companies.
The ontological approach to HR Management differs from the other examples in that it is
developed and implemented by a large, global company. I would like to stress that this is the
context where management ontologies are particularly useful and worth the effort. Size of the
company and resulting reuse will allow for important scale effects. Consequently, on the whole,
necessary efforts are comparably low. For an SME, development, implementation and
maintenance appear far too costly.
Both examples of knowledge management are results of research projects; there is no data
available on their practical application. For the development, implementation and maintenance of
an ontology for corporate knowledge management apply the same restrictions apply as for an HR
ontology.
2.4 Note on Deployment in Other Areas
Despite the focus of this work on business application and ontological questions related to
management activities, a brief tour d’horizon on some outstanding ontologies in other areas seems
indispensable. Power of the ontological method and the resulting tools are estimated to be best
illustrated by examples.
Medical ontologies are used to satisfy demand for the reuse and sharing of patient data, their
transmission and /or the need of semantic-based criteria for statistics (Gómez-Pérez, Fernández-
López & Corcho, 2004). Unambiguous and detailed terminology is a crucial feature in current
medical systems, as a number of agents must interact between them in order to share their
results. Special attention deserve 191 GALEN – a clinical terminology for specifying restrictions
used in medical domains, UMLS (Unified Medical Language System) – a database designed to
integrate biomedical terms collected from various sources and ON9 – a medical set of ontologies
that includes some terminology systems.
191
More information is available online at: http://www.opengalen.org/, http://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/umls/umlsmain.html and
http://ksi.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/KAW/KAW98/gangemi/(2008/06/16).