An ontology defines a common vocabulary for researchers who need to share information in a domain. It includes machine-interpretable definitions of basic concepts in the domain and relations among them. It can be used to : share common understanding of the structure of information among people or software agents; enable reuse of domain knowledge ; make explicit domain assumptions; separate the domain knowledge from the operational knowledge; analyze domain knowledge.For the above reasons, ontologies are widely applied to knowledge engineering, digital library, software reuse, information retrieval, semantic web, etc.It's a hot topic in computer science research.There are mainly five parts in this paper.Part 1 Introduction of ontology. It's definition, elements, classification of ontology, constructing and evaluating methodology.Part 2 Differences and similarities among three knowledge organization systems: ontology, classification shema and thesaurus.Part 3 Relevant technologies and standards to ontologies. Including XML,RDF, ontology description languages.Part 4 Cases study. Look into several ontologes to find what we can use for reference.Part 5 The applications of ontologies to networked information organization and information retrieval. |