Formal Ontology and Information Systems-英文文献.pdf

Amended version of a paper appeared in N. Guarino (ed.), Formal Ontology in Information Systems. Proceedings of FOIS’98, Trento, Italy, 6-8 June 1998. Amsterdam, IOS Press, pp. 3-15. Formal Ontology and Information Systems Nicola Guarino National Research Council, LADSEB-CNR, Corso Stati Uniti 4, I-35127 Padova, Italy guarino@r.it Abstract. Research on ontology is becoming increasingly widespread in the com- puter science community, and its importance is being recognized in a multiplicity of research fields and application areas, including knowledge engineering, database design and integration, information retrieval and extraction. We shall use the generic term “in- formation systems”, in its broadest sense, to collectively refer to these application per- spectives. We argue in this paper that so-called ontologies present their own methodo- logical and architectural peculiarities: on the methodological side, their main peculiar- ity is the adoption of a highly interdisciplinary approach, while on the architectural side the most interesting aspect is the centrality of the role they can play in an infor- mation system, leading to the perspective of ontology-driven information systems. 1 Introduction Research on ontology is becoming increasingly widespread in the computer science com- munity. While this term has been rather confined to the philosophical sphere in the past, it is now gaining a specific role in Artificial Intelligence, Computational Linguistics, and Da- tabase Theory. In particular, its importance is being recognized in research fields as diverse as knowledge engineering [20,45,15,18], knowledge representation [23,2,42], qualitative modelling [19,9,13], language engineering [31,5], database desi