definitions for general-purpose terms and acts as a foundation for more specific domain ontologies. In this paper we outline the strategy used to create the current version of the SUMO, discuss some of the challenges that we faced in constructing the ontology, and describe in detail its most general concepts

To support the sharing and reuse of formally represented knowledge among AI systems, it is useful to define the common vocabulary in which shared knowledge is represented. A specification of a representational vocabulary for a shared domain of discourse — definitions of classes, relations

then consider the bene ts of and describe, a more formal approach. We re-visit the scoping phase, and discuss the role of formal languages and techniques in the specification, implementation and evaluation of ontologies. Finally, we review the state of the art and practice in this emerging field,

Research on ontology is becoming increasingly widespread in the computer science community, and its importance is being recognized in a multiplicity of research fields and application areas, including knowledge engineering, database design and integration, information retrieval and extraction. We

In recent years the development of ontologies—explicit formal specifications of the terms in the domain and relations among them (Gruber 1993)—has been moving from the realm of Artificial-Intelligence laboratories to the desktops of domain experts. Ontologies have become common on the World

in current computer technology. Ontologies provide a shared and common understanding of a domain that can be communicated between people and application systems. Therefore, they may play a major role in supporting information exchange processes in various areas. This book discusses the role ontologies

Researchers in the ontology-design field have developed the content for ontologies in many domain areas. Recently, ontologies have become increasingly common on the WorldWide Web where they provide semantics for annotations in Web pages. This distributed nature of ontology development has led

This RFC describes the details of the domain system and protocol, and assumes that the reader is familiar with the concepts discussed in a companion RFC, "Domain Names- Concepts and Facilities " [RFC-1034]. The domain system is a mixture of functions and data types which are an official

The OWL Web Ontology Language is a new formal language for representing ontologies in the Semantic Web. OWL has features from several families of representation languages, including primarily Description Logics and frames. OWL also shares many characteristics with RDF, the W3C base of the Semantic

Reusable ontologies are becoming increasingly important for tasks such as information integration, knowledge-level interoperation, and knowledgebase development. We have developed a set of tools and services to support the process of achieving consensus on common shared ontologies by geographically