Innovation and Ontologies

178 Classification – The OntoCube
Application Ontology Domain Ontology Generic Ontology
• Contains definitions
to model the
knowledge for a
particular application.
• Mix of concepts taken
from domain and
generic ontologies or
from an ontology
library.
• May contain method-
and task-specific
extensions.
• Expresses specific
conceptualization for
domain at hand.
• Constrains structure
and contents of
domain knowledge
(which describes
factual situations).
• Concepts often
defined as
specializations of
concepts in generic
ontologies.
• Concepts considered
to be generic across
many fields; examples
are state, event,
process, action
component etc.
Representation
Ontology
• Explains the
conceptualization that
underly knowledge
representation
formalisms.
• Neutral with respect
to world entities.
• Provides
representational
framework without
making claims about
the world.
table 49 Categories for the subject of conceptualization (van Heijst, Schreiber & Wielinga, 1997)
The dimension amount and type of structure of the conceptualization is a new contribution to the
classification efforts. The authors distinguish three categories:
• Terminological ontology: Specification of terms used to represent knowledge in the domain of
discourse (e.g. lexicons).
• Information ontology: Specification of the record structure of databases (e.g. database scheme).
• Knowledge modeling ontology: Specification of conceptualizations of the knowledge; richer internal
structure (compared to domain ontologies); often tuned to a particular use of the knowledge
that they describe; knowledge modeling ontology can e.g. group observations (of an
information ontology) to describe the decision-making process.
The axis of amount and structure, though of potential for practical use, did not find a significant
number of supporters in the community and has not often been reused. The dimension of
structure, on the other hand, has found broad acceptance as it provided more details than the
suggestions by Mizoguchi, Vanwelkenhuysen & Ikeda (1995) and Uschold & Grueninger (1996).
figure 59 Two-dimensional classification of ontologies by van Heijst, Schreiber & Wielinga (1997)