Ontology of SCIENCE


This is a slightly improved version of the KA² ontology developed by Knowldge Annotation Initiative of the Knowledge Acquisition Community. The original ontology is available at the KA² portal, coded in F-Logic, DAML and OIL and on the Spanish mirror of the Ontolingua, under login "ontologias-ka2" and password "adieu007". Papers describing it can be found in both sites.

I developed this ontology as a domain testbed for a multi-agent system architecture (to be published in SSGRR-2001) to search, classify pages and extract information from them that correspond to classes of the ontology. Although I decided to organize a science ontology prior to finding KAČ ontology, I could benefit from the reuse of ontologies, one of the good advantages of employing them.

I made minor modifications along all of it, particularly asserting new inverse relations and trying to assign the correct allowed classes for the relations, but at least two changes deserve comments.

The first one relates to publications. Instead of having a single class for publications with subclasses book, article, etc, I created two sub classes: The other modification concerns the class Events, which is now divided on Scientific-Event and Educational-Event. I assumed that Scientific-Events are the ones which have scientific committees and deadlines, and Educational Events are the ones in which courses are given.

In making these two modifications I aimed at allowing for a better understanding of some classes like Journal, which is a publication but also an event (it has a committe and deadline) and School (seen as an event), which inherits from both Scientific-Event and Educational-Event.

It includes (and depends upon) two very simple ontologies of time and locations that may be substituted by more adequate ones.

Author: Fred Freitas

Download