Ontologies and Taxonomies In the Semantic Web
How LIS and Computer Science Need to Join Forces To Make This Happen
Jun 1, 2009
Ontologies are as ancient as human language, but interestingly the very nature of this branch of philosophy will be required in order for the Web to move from its current state to the oft-promised Semantic Web.
The study of the nature of being, existence, and reality, ontology is important concept in a wide range of subject disciplines including linguistics, English, computer science, library and information science, and philosophy. Interestingly, if the Semantic Web (coined by the inventor of the internet, Tim Berners-Lee) is to be realized, professionals from these fields will be important players.
Library and Information Science (LIS) and Computer Science (CS) Join Forces
LIS and cataloguing professionals are not only familiar with these concepts, as they often form the core of their work and part of the educational curricula. The traditional skills of librarianship - thesaurus construction, metadata design, and information organization - are deeply important in the creation of this next stage of Web development.
In fact, a library consultant, Katherine Adams was one of the first to make the connection between the work of librarians and computers scientists when she made the assertion that commonalities exist in both professions, for librarians create taxonomies and computer scientists who build ontologies.
Of Taxonomies and Ontologies
While ontologies describe relationships in an n-dimensional manner, easily allowing information from multiple perspectives, taxonomies are limited to hierarchical relationships. In an RDF environment, ontologies provide a capability that extends the utility of taxonomies. The beauty of ontologies is that it can be linked to another ontology to take advantage of its data in conjunction with your own.
Because of this linkability, taxonomies are clearly limited as they are more classification schemes that primarily describe part-whole relationships between terms. Ontologies are the organizing, sense-making complement to graphs and metadata, and mapping among ontologies is how domain-level data become interconnected over the data Web.
How Librarians and Computer Scientists Complement and Contrast
Some of the librarians work with knowledge that computer scientists are looking for when trying to envision the Semantic Web, the two disciplines do have unique differences. While computer science is concerned with how software and associated machines interact with ontologies, LIS is more concerned with how their users retrieve information and as a way to facilitate certain types of information-seeking behaviour with the aid of taxonomies.
Moreover, as computer science professionals perceive hierarchies as logical structures that help machines make decisions, while LIS professionals view these information structures in terms of mapping out a topic for the benefit of patrons. Nonetheless, there is collaboration to be made between LIS and Computer science, particularly when mapping concepts, skills, and jargon between computer scientists and librarians encourages collaboration.
- Taxonomies - An Important Part of the Semantic Web, the new Web entails adding an extra layer of infrastructure to the current HTML Web - metadata in the form of vocabularies and the relationships that exist between selected terms will make this possible for machines to understand conceptual relationships as humans do.
- Defining Ontologies and Taxonomies - Ontologies and taxonomies are used synonymously -- Computer Scientists refer to hierarchies of structured vocabularies as "ontology" while librarians call them "taxonomy."
- Standardized Language and Conceptual Relationships - Both taxonomies and ontologies consist of a structured vocabulary that identifies a single key term to represent a concept that could be described using several words.
- Different Points of Emphasis - Computer Science is concerned with how software and associated machines interact with ontologies; in contrast, librarians are concerned with how patrons retrieve information with the aid of taxonomies. Despite these apparent differences, they are essentially different sides of the same coin.
Computer Science and LIS are working to solve problems of information retrieval and the exchange of knowledge between user groups. Whether they are doing it together or doing it separately, ontologies and taxonomies will be extremely important to a number of computer scientists by facilitating the sharing and reuse of digital information.
References
Adams, Katherine. "The semantic Web: Differentiating between taxonomies and ontologies" Online. Jul/Aug 2002.
Technology Forecast: Spring 09. Ed. Paul Horowitz. PricewaterhouseCoopers. May 2009. pp.56.
