Contents


Preface

Ontology in the philosophical sense is concerned with the nature of being as well as with respective basic concepts. Aristotle called ontology the first philosophy. Despite its metaphysical nature, this first philosophy or ontology is a significant attempt to introduce a systematic approach to the process of thinking about the world surrounding us, about our conceptual thinking and about us ourselves.

Today's advanced science inherited the original ontology's efforts to systemize and conceptualize. In this respect the concept of ontology nowadays is a non-speculative methodology for studying reality objects and used tools, both of which are important for our orientation in the physical, technical, mental, and social worlds. As such, we deal with the process of studying, as well as with the outcomes of such study, of the objects observed or created by man and their respective concepts, relations between them, and relations between their systems in different fields of

Understood in this modern and precise way, this book applies the meaning of ontology in a search for semantic meanings of objects and concepts. It examines the relations between general or abstract terms and their meanings using a variety of logics such as automated indexation of databases. Therefore, the meaning of "to be" and "how to be" is exercised in complex or abstracted cases, for example, in number theory. The objective is to model, categorize, and conceptualize the knowledge available, and to design relevant schemes such as function-related diagrams or tree structures. Then, pending on the field of study, it is possible to discuss, introduce, and compare a variety of ontologies as the formal models representing our knowledge of the field or the problem. As such, it is possible to discuss ontology as it relates to experimental organization, software and systems engineering, artificial

intelligence, the Semantic Web, and informatics and information sciences.

especially in the initial stages of studying the problems.

Through these kinds of ontologies we understand the models with standard structures of entities, classes, qualities, and relations. Such models are explicit, created using suitable language and formalized descriptions of the given systems of the objects or their respective concepts and relations. Then we speak about a model or a data model of the problems. The language used for these purposes can be formal (e.g., languages of physical or mathematical theories), semiformal, or informal,

However, ontologies are not only the final formal and declarative representations, models, or data models of given problems but they are also the methodology and, consequently, the method and the process of creating these declarations or models. Ontology as a process creates, uses, and provides, as its output, a model or descriptive ontology. Such a model is a glossary of definitions of concepts corresponding to the objects, a thesaurus of definitions of the relations among the concepts and the respective objects. Thus, the ontology in this descriptive sense is both vocabulary and grammar that are used to keep and pass over the knowledge of the problems

science.

studied.
