Ontology the novice perspective: Understanding Ontology

Essay from the year 2012 in the subject Computer Science - Miscellaneous, grade: none, Kampala International University (school of postgraduate studies), course: philosophy of computing, language: English, abstract: Ontology has been attracting a lot of attention recently. While ontology research begun in the early 90's in the knowledge base community, the research activity has been accelerated and spread over the web technology community by the semantic web movement in the last few years. Many people talk about ontology nowadays. However, there seems to be some misunderstandings about what ontology is and what ontological engineering is, how it is useful, etc. The purpose of this paper is to clarify issues on ontology and ontological engineering and to describe the author's personal views on how ontological engineering should contribute to the future knowledge processing.