1. Spicing Up Your Knowledge Management Strategy
with a pinch of ontology
John Carter
Vice President
Apelon, Inc.

2. Background and Introduction

3. Google ngram viewer. Appearances in books (as a percentage of all n-grams), through 2008.
All the cool kids are doing ontology these days.

4. An ontology is a system for organizing ideas and relationships between them.
Look at all the things that are NOT included in that definition: size and complexity don’t matter. Fancy logical calculus doesn’t matter. Software doesn’t matter. By this definition, ontologies are everywhere, and I believe that to be true. A lot of them are pretty simple, and a lot of them aren’t even really written out in detail because it’s not necessary… but they’re ontologies nonetheless. Also, note that the ontology is separate from any use of it… it’s an abstract model.

5. How things are the same
How they are different

6. Ontology lives here. Figure from Sharman, Kishore and Ramesh, p. 26.
Glaring error… unstructured is usually a LOT bigger than structured.

7. Some Distinctions Vocabulary, Terminology, Nomenclature Taxonomy
All about words (including a thesaurus function), includes varying degrees of formality from simple lists to full-blown PhD-stumping ontologies
Taxonomy
Typically a single-membership hierarchy
Ontology
Usually more formally/explicitly defined, multiple hierarchies, typically includes an element of computability or inferential capabilities
Focus on categorization

8. Some Good Ontology Practices
Multi hierarchies / dimensions / aspects / axes
Meaningless identifiers
Complete, non-overlapping categories
Name independence (thesaurus)
Technology independence
Application independence
Language independence
Don’t show off

9. Examples, Tools, Resources

10. Bioportal, housing over 500 distinct ontologies.

11. Amazon Browse Tree, a really useful ontology in action.

13. Semantic MediaWiki

14. Protégé, a popular ontology authoring tool (although “popular” and “ontology authoring” are seldom found together).

15. Two Key Information Retrieval Strategies
Search
Works best if you know what you want
“Google” as a verb
Ontology in the background
Browse
Turns finding information into a multiple-choice exercise
The most visible ontology application
A hybrid approach usually works best

16. Integration vs. Federation
Early days of the UMLS…

17. Anything you can do, I can do meta
Ontologies can be used to manage structural metadata as well as direct content
Media type
User type
Geography, language
Audience suitability / ratings
Difficulty rating
Grown-up-ness
And so on

18. Q: What’s your favorite _____?
A: Java, for sure!

19. One slide to rule them all

20. Major Knowledge Management Goals Spiced up!
Get the right information to the right user at the right time
Ontology helps you define “right” (ontology to categorize information, ontology to organize user types and needs, ontology to define temporal constraints)
Unify silos of information
Easier to categorize resources in ontological families than to fully unify all information
Enhance system usability
Ontology supports augmented search, browse interface, filtering
Identify information gaps, overlaps, and errors
Ontological model defines quality criteria
Disambiguate and clarify knowledge resources
An ontology can provide formal context even when language is unclear

21. Acknowledged and Recommended
Chapter 2

22. Thanks!
John Carter
Vice President
Apelon, Inc.