Mad cows, metathesauri, and meaning
D. Clark · IEEE Intelligent Systems and their Applications · 1999
The idea of getting computers to understand the meaning of words has been researched in computer science departments and university AI labs around the world for several years. Out of that emerged the term ontology, borrowed from philosophy, where it means the study of being. In the world of computer science, clearly some of the research time was spent refining definitions of ontology. The paper considers how the growth of the Web and the promise of profit in e-commerce is quickly moving ontology out of the research labs and into commercial development.