Webscripter: world-wide grassroots ontology translation via implicit end user alignment
Martin R. Frank, Pedro A. Szekely, Robert T. Neches, Baoshi Yan, Juan Manuel López López · 2002
Ontologies define hierarchies of classes and attributes; they are meta-data: data about data. XML Schema and RDF Schema are both (lightweight) ontology definition languages in that sense. In the "traditional" approach to ontology engineering, experts add new data by carefully analyzing others' ontologies and fitting their new concepts into the existing hierarchy. In the emerging "Semantic Web" approach to ontology engineering, ordinary users may not look at anyone's ontology before creating theirs -- instead, they may simply define a new local schema from scratch that addresses their immediate needs, without worrying how their data may some day integrate with others'.