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"KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION WITH ONTOLOGIES: PRESENT CHALLENGES - FUTURE
POSSIBILITIES"
Guest Editors: Christopher Brewster and Kieron O"Hara
Recently, we have seen an explosion of interest in ontologies as artifacts
to represent human knowledge and as critical components in knowledge
management, the Semantic Web, business-to-business applications, and several
other application areas. Various research communities commonly assume that
ontologies are the appropriate modelling structure for representing
knowledge. However, little discussion has occurred regarding the actual
range of knowledge an ontology can successfully represent.
What are the limits of ontology-based representation? Some types of
knowledge are extremely suited to ontological representation, such as
taxonomic information, but clearly this isn"t always the case. We can"t
always easily represent certain types of knowledge (for example, skills or
distributed knowledge), nor easily transform types of representation into
ontology-appropriate formats (for example, diagrammatic knowledge). And with
the expanded recognition of multiple modalities, does our vision of an
ontology change? Can we speak of multi-media ontologies? This is of even
greater significance as Knowledge Management recognises more exactly the
range of knowledge that is embodied in an organisation.
Most, but not all, definitions of "ontology" insist that an ontology
specifically represents common, shared conceptual structures. Does this
requirement for publicity help guarantee adequacy? And if so, can we talk of
personal ontologies? If ontologies have to represent knowledge relatively
coarsely or approximately, how much is this likely to matter in realistic
contexts? Will scale be a problem?
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