Ontologies: The beginning

Imagine an entity capable of representing any amount of information, no matter what type it is, with the wonderful feature of such information has a low percentage (or nothing) of ambiguity… also imagine this super knowledge structure was able to infer new questions about the information using a set of rules… and still better imagine that we can take this concept to the web…

This concept has proven to be capable of solving structural, organisation conflicts and problems related with interpreting information. This structure has been called ONTOLOGY. Apparently, this type of proposal have enormous potential, for this reason many scientists have started to use them in several research areas like: databases and recovery data, data mining, natural language processing, etc.

And not only that, also the enterprise world has already started to use ontologies, for example currently there are web content management systems (CMS) that use  description languages of ontologies to create semantic websites.

At this moment, I would like to say you that there are several description languages to describe an ontology, but that is other subject for another article.

If this information it appears interesting for you I recommend to read these websites:

• http://protege.stanford.edu/. Protegé website, an open-source ontologies editor written in Java.
• http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-features/. The W3C Specification about OWL (Web Ontology Language).
• https://wiki.base22.com/display/btg/Semantic+Web. An extensive compendium of information about semantic web, written by the team of Base22 (the nice company where I am working right now :p).