Ontology: A collection of all the concepts, their definition, and their interrelationships occuring with a particular domain

Ontologies provide a structure for organizing information within a domain.

Ontologies are dictionaries in which the definitions are interpretable by machines, giving rise to natural language access to information (multi-lingual resources, ontology-assisted search, information extraction).

Pure Ontologies

Traditionally ontologies exist on their own, providing an independent, sharable resource focusing on modeling concepts and their interrelationships

Integrated Ontologies

Ontologies have much in common with:

• Object Oriented Programming/Object Databases

• Unified Modeling Language (UML) in software engineering

• Modeling and Simulation

• Semantic Networks (AI)

in that the formal languages used to build these systems have similar features (for sample, adhering to object-oriented design).

An integrated ontology is built as part of a larger famework supporting all these activities.