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Geographical Ontologies Download Page So what's all this recent interest in ontologies? In the Semantic Web environment,
if you envision computers ultimately to be able to understand natural language text - mind you I said
understand not just parse natural language text - then there must be an explicit knowledge
base that represents elements of a natural language as a set of unambiguously defined concepts.
These concepts must have explicit definitions that are fully understood by computers. This is the
importance of ontologies. As has been said many times before, an ontology is nothing more than
a definition of reality - some individual's interpretation of what exists and therefore constitutes
nothing more than one person's ideal of reality.
This is where ontologies become critical. Ontologies are the medium that allows the presentation of
elements of a natural language - words - to be understood by computers. Ontologies can be nothing more
than a word list. However, a word list does not contain a definition and would, therefore be
limited in use due to the ambiquity of the meaning of the terms. A basic dictionaries in digital form, for
example WordNet could be considered an ontology, but would
not be fully understandable by a computer since the definitions are in a natural lauguage form. To
resolve this dilemma, all definitions; and all those relationships, associations, and properties that are
an integral part of an unambiguous definition in natural language text must be translated into a form
that is understandable to current and future inference engine software.
In the near future, on a domain-by-domain basis, we will begin loading OWL/RDF ontologies of the list of
broad subject areas listed below. Remember, this entire project has been concerned with object in the
visible domain and the taxonomy and the resulting ontologies will be concerned primarily with real-world features,
their definitions, their relationships to each other, and how to display them in simulation space. To
a lesser extent, there will also be significant information on processes and interactions but that is
for others to persue - we are concerned with defining those object that are a visual reality in the
natural and cultural environment.
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