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Lightweight Ontologies

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Encyclopedia of Database Systems

Synonyms

Controlled vocabularies; Taxonomies; Thesauri; Business catalogues; Faceted classifications; Web directories; Topic hierarchies User classifications

Definition

Ontologies are explicit specifications of conceptualizations [7]. They are often thought of as directed graphs whose nodes represent concepts and whose edges represent relations between concepts. The notion of a concept is understood as defined in Knowledge Representation, i.e., as a set of objects or individuals [2]. This set is called the concept extension or the concept interpretation. Concepts are often lexically defined, i.e., they have natural language names which are used to describe the concept extensions (e.g., concept motherdenotes the set of all female parents). Therefore, when ontologies are visualized, their nodes are often shown with corresponding natural language concept names. The backbone structure of the ontology graph is a taxonomy in which the relations are “is-a,” whereas the remaining structure...

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Recommended Reading

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Trento, Trento,  , Italy

    Fausto Giunchiglia & Ilya Zaihrayeu

Authors
  1. Fausto Giunchiglia
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  2. Ilya Zaihrayeu
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 266 Ferst Drive, 30332-0765, Atlanta, GA, USA

    LING LIU (Professor) (Professor)

  2. Database Research Group David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, N2L 3G1, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. TAMER ÖZSU (Professor and Director, University Research Chair) (Professor and Director, University Research Chair)

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© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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Giunchiglia, F., Zaihrayeu, I. (2009). Lightweight Ontologies. In: LIU, L., ÖZSU, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_1314

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