Ontologies

The history of artificial intelligence shows that knowledge is critical for intelligent systems. In many cases, better knowledge can be more important for solving a task than better algorithms. To have truly intelligent systems, knowledge needs to be captured, processed, reused, and communicated. Ontologies support all these tasks.

The term "ontology" can be defined as an explicit specification of conceptualization. Ontologies capture the structure of the domain, i.e. conceptualization. This includes the model of the domain with possible restrictions. The conceptualization describes knowledge about the domain, not about the particular state of affairs in the domain. In other words, the conceptualization is not changing, or is changing very rarely. Ontology is then specification of this conceptualization - the conceptualization is specified by using particular modeling language and particular terms. Formal specification is required in order to be able to process ontologies and operate on ontologies automatically.

Ontology describes a domain, while a knowledge base (based on an ontology) describes particular state of affairs. Each knowledge based system or agent has its own knowledge base, and only what can be expressed using an ontology can be stored and used in the knowledge base. When an agent wants to communicate to another agent, he uses the constructs from some ontology. In order to understand in communication, ontologies must be shared between agents.