Ontology : A survey

Summary :
During the last decade, the explosive growth of information technologies led to a shift in the market and economic view of the society: communication and knowledge sharing became the new economic stakes. But everyone speaks his own language, with his own terms and meanings. Ontologies seem to be one of the most suitable solutions faced with this problem and have become a very popular research topic in knowledge representation. But several problems remain which claim for clarification.

The main objective of this survey is to make explic it the main questions about ontology and to draw some guidelines about the possible answers. Copyright © 2003 IFAC