Practical ontologies for information professionals

More data and information is being created than ever before. Ontologies, formal representations of knowledge with rich semantic relationships, have become increasingly important in the context of today's information overload and data deluge. The publishing and sharing of explicit explanations for a wide variety of concepts, in a machine readable format, has the power to both improve information retrieval and discover new knowledge. Information professionals are key contributors to the development of new, and increasingly useful, ontologies.

Practical Ontologies for Information Professionals provides an accessible introduction to the following:

defining the concept of ontologies and why they are increasingly important to information professionals; ontologies and the Semantic Web; existing ontologies, such as RDF, RDFS, SKOS, and OWL2; adopting and building ontologies, showing how to avoid repetition of work and how to build a simple ontology; interrogating ontologies for reuse; and the future of ontologies and the role of the information professional in their development and use.

• List of figures and tables p. viii
• 1 What is an ontology? p. 1
• Introduction p. 1
• The data deluge and information overload p. 1
• Defining terms p. 4
• Knowledge organization systems and ontologies p. 5
• Ontologies, metadata and linked data p. 15
• What can an ontology do? p. 17
• Ontologies and information professionals p. 21
• Alternatives to ontologies p. 22
• The aims of this book p. 24
• The structure of this book p. 25
• 2 Ontologies and the semantic web p. 27
• Introduction p. 27
• The semantic web and linked data p. 27
• Resource Description Framework (RDF) p. 28
• Classes, subclasses and properties p. 30
• The semantic web stack p. 31
• Embedded RDF p. 42
• Alternative semantic visions p. 46
• Libraries and the semantic web p. 47
• Other cultural heritage institutions and the semantic web p. 49
• Other organizations and the semantic web p. 50
• Conclusion p. 51
• 3 Existing ontologies p. 53
• Introduction p. 53
• Ontology documentation p. 53
• Ontologies for representing ontologies p. 54
• Ontologies for libraries p. 63
• Upper ontologies p. 68
• Cultural heritage data models p. 70
• Ontologies for the web p. 71
• Conclusion p. 78
• 4 Adopting ontologies p. 79
• Introduction p. 79
• Reusing ontologies: application profiles and data models p. 79
• Identifying ontologies p. 83
• The ideal ontology discovery tool p. 89
• Selection criteria p. 92
• Conclusion p. 95
• 5 Building ontologies p. 97
• Introduction p. 97
• Approaches to building an ontology p. 97
• The twelve steps p. 100
• Ontology development example: Bibliometric Metrics Ontology element set p. 127
• Conclusion p. 135
• 6 Interrogating ontologies p. 137
• Introduction p. 137
• Interrogating ontologies for reuse p. 138
• Interrogating a knowledge base p. 139
• Understanding ontology use p. 148
• Conclusion p. 154
• 7 The future of ontologies and the information professional p. 155
• Introduction p. 155
• The future of ontologies for knowledge discovery p. 155
• The future role of library and information professionals p. 158
• The practical development of ontologies p. 162
• Conclusion p. 164
• Bibliography p. 165
• Index p. 179