Seed ontologies
Peter C. Weinstein, Gene Alloway · 1997
Ontologies are more than a particularly elaborate approach to the description and classification of information.They can be used to support the operation and growth of a new kind of digital library, implemented as a distributed, intelligent system.We describe the design and use of ontologies in the University of Michigan Digital Library.These ontologies will model all aspects of the digital library, including content, services, and licenses.We have refined and extended the IFLA hierarchy for the realization of work, and are starting to use ontologies to support reasoning about content search.We have also used the ontologies to classify the capabilities of computational elements of the system (agents), in a dynamic way that sustains functionality as new agents are added to the system.'Compared to description systems developed in the library community, ontologies are more expressive, precise, and powerful.They are expressive because each term is defined in relation to other terms in a complex web (directed graph) of meaning (Gorman [92] makes a wistful plea for such a structure).They are precise in the sense of formal logic: the semantic denotation of each concept is a set of objects, and