Monday, November 21, 2005

Ontologies and Semantics for Seamless Connectivity 

Ontologies and Semantics for Seamless Connectivity by Michael Uschold and Michael Gruninger, 2004.
"...2.3 Ontologies vs. Database Schema
There are many interesting relationships between database schema and formal ontologies. We will consider the following issues: language expressivity, systems that implement the languages and usage scenarios. There is much overlap in expressivity, including: objects, properties, aggregation, generalization, set-valued properties, and constraints. For example, entities in an ER model correspond to concepts or classes in ontologies, and attributes and relations in an ER model correspond to relations or properties in most ontology languages. For both, there is a vocabulary of terms with natural language definitions. Such definitions are in separate data dictionaries for DB schema, and are inline comments in ontologies. Arguably, there is little or no obvious essential difference between a language used for building DB schema and one for building ontologies. They are similar beasts. There are many specific differences in expressivity, which vary in importance. Many of the differences are attributable to the historically different ways that DB schema and ontologies have been used...."

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