Evolution of Ontologies and Types

Thierry Despeyroux (1)

1 AxIS - Usage-centered design, analysis and improvement of information systems

Ontologies are heavily used in the context of the Semantic Web (Berners-Lee 1998, 2001) to formalize human knowledge. Ontologies engineering is now an important activity, and specialized softwares are developed to help in managing huge ontologies. The development of ontologies and of information systems can be compared to the development of programs. In this paper we make a parallel between ontologies and types in programming languages, and we use a small example to show that an ontology can be seen as a type system. When an ontology evolves, studying the impact of this evolution on the semantic annotations that use this ontology can be viewed as a type-checking process. The next step should be to import some notions used in the types community as overloading, polymorphism, type parameters, etc. to improve or create more powerful ontology definition languages.

Mots clés: Ontology; Type; Information system; Semantic-Web

Domaines: Recherche d'information [cs.IR]; Web

Thierry Despeyroux. Evolution of Ontologies and Types. IADIS International conference WWW/Internet 2008, IADIS, Oct 2008, Freiburg, Germany. ⟨inria-00586056⟩