Despues de realizar una búsqueda de documentos relevantes sobre el tema ”distopías” en distintos servicios: CINDOC, Dialnet, Citeseer, Oaister, Scholar, he podido observar que:

1.- Oaister es la más completa de todas, ya que ofrece datos de caracter técnico y notas que pueden llevar a decantarse por uno u otro artículo, libro y demás elementos de interés y puedes elegir el orden por el que salen los documentos en cuanto a los más frecuentados, autores, etc o el tipo de soporte que se busca.

2.- Google académico (Scholar) ofrece una cantidad ingente de información con la que a veces resulta dificil de diliar. Lo bueno es que a la izquierda del título pone si es formato pdf, si es libro, o si es cita; aunque se echa de menos un filtro más exhaustivo, aunque al igual que el ggogle tradicional se puede emplear el uso de las comillas o el signo sumatorio para realizar una búsqueda más exhaustiva.

3.- La búsqueda resultante en CiteSeer es muy pobre (al menos con la palabra escogida).

4.-Dialnet, aunque en mi búsqueda no ha ofrecido grandes resultados, parece que tiene un amplio repertorio en cuanto a revistas y tésis y ambitos de estudio de ámbas.

5.- En IEDCYT (CINDOC), según su presentación su principal línea de actuación es analizar, recopilar, difundir y potenciar la información científica en todas las áreas del conocimiento. Aunque con la información buscada no he tenido éxito, parece ser una página con buenos objetivos.

La Web 2.0 es la representación de la evolución (la transición) de las aplicaciones tradicionales que funcionan a través de la web enfocadas al usuario final. La Web 2.0 es una actitud con la que debemos trabajar para desarrollar en Internet y no precisamente una tecnología.Antes, la web se era un entorno estático, con páginas en HTML que sufrían pocas actualizaciones y no tenían interacción con el usuario. Ahora se emplean aplicaciones que generan colaboración, y servicios que reemplacen las aplicaciones de escritorio.

Todo inició cuando Dale Dougherty utilizó este término en una conferencia en la que compartió una lluvia de ideas junto a Craig Cline en la que hablaba del renacimiento y evolución de la web.

Constantemente estaban surgiendo nuevas aplicaciones y sitios con sorprendentes funcionalidades. Así se dio la pauta para la Web 2.0 conference de 2004. Esta conferencia no solo fue exitosa sino que ya tuvo seguimiento en la Web 2.0 Conference del 2005 celebrada en Octubre.

En la charla inicial del Web Conference se habló de los principios que tenían las aplicaciones Web 2.0:

• La web es la plataforma.
• La información es el procesador.
• Efectos de la red movidos por una arquitectura de participación.
• La innovación surge de características distribuidas por desarrolladores independientes.
• El fin del círculo de adopción de software (“Servicios en beta perpetuo”).

La Web 2.0 con ejemplos

La forma más fácil de comprender lo que significa la Web 2.0 es a través de ejemplos. Podemos comparar servicios web que marcan claramente la evolución hacia el Web 2.0:

• Web 1.0 > Web 2.0
• Doubleclick –> Google AdSense (Servicios Publicidad)
• Ofoto –> Flickr (Comunidades fotográficas)
• Akamai –> BitTorrent (Distribución de contenidos)
• mp3.com –> Napster (Descargas de música)
• Britannica Online –> Wikipedia (Enciclopedias)
• Sitios personales –> Blogs (Páginas personales)
• Especulación con dominios –> Optimización en motores de búsqueda
• Page views –> Cost per click
• Content Management SystemsPrevisualizar » –> Wikis (Manejo de contenidos)
• Categorías/Directorios (taxonomía) –> Tagging (“folksonomy”)

Tecnologías que dan vida a un proyecto Web 2.0:

• Transformar software de escritorio hacia la plataforma del web.
• Respeto a los estándares del XHTML.
• Separación de contenido del diseño con uso de hojas de estilo.
• Sindicación de contenidos.
• Ajax (Asincronical javascript and xml).
• Uso de Flash, Flex o Lazlo.
• Uso de Ruby on Rails para programar páginas dinámicas.
• Utilización de redes sociales al manejar usuarios y comunidades.
• Dar control total a los usuarios en el manejo de su información.
• Proveer APis o XML para que las aplicaciones puedan ser manipuladas por otros.
• Facilitar el posicionamiento con URL sencillos.

¿En qué nos sirve la Web 2.0?

El uso de el término de Web 2.0 está de moda, dándole mucho peso a una tendencia que ha estado presente desde hace algún tiempo. En Internet las especulaciones han sido causantes de grandes burbujas tecnológicas y han hecho fracasar a muchos proyectos.

Además, los proyectos tienen que renovarse y evolucionar: en Internet, el cambio debe de estar presente más frecuentemente.
        Conclusión personal: la Web 2.0 está siendo una de las aplicaciones que más está trascendiendo la sociedad actual. Las redes sociales están teniendo un impacto impresionante y de alguna manera están cambiando las actitudes y costumbres de la gente. A pesar de este cambio en el que todo parece moverse en torno a la Web, hay gente como Nieves González que cree que solo se trata de una moda pasajera: “La 2.0 es solo un término de moda que pasará como ya antes pasó con “Las superautopistas de la información”.
Sin embargo yo no creo que sea así, las necesidades o imposiciones por parte de la sociedad en cuanto al uso de Web, parece mucho más fuerte que una simple moda pasajera.

       Information taken from:

•  http://www.maestrosdelweb.com/editorial/web2/
• http://bibliotecarios2-0.blogspot.com/2007/05/bibliotecarios-20.html (Biblitecarios 2.o de Nieves González)
• To read further*: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html?page=5

* Some important ideas taken from the last link:

• One of the key lessons of the Web 2.0 era is this Users add value. But only a small percentage of users will go to the trouble of adding value to your application via explicit means. Therefore, Web 2.0 companies set inclusive defaults for aggregating user data and building value as a side-effect of ordinary use of the application.
• The Web 2.0 lesson: leverage customer-self service and algorithmic data management to reach out to the entire web, to the edges and not just the center, to the long tail and not just the head.
• The Web As Platform: Like many important concepts, Web 2.0 doesn’t have a hard boundary, but rather, a gravitational core. You can visualize Web 2.0 as a set of principles and practices that tie together a veritable solar system of sites that demonstrate some or all of those principles, at a varying distance from that core.

INFORMATION TAKEN FROM:

http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/m/metadata.html

http://www.library.uq.edu.au/iad/ctmeta4.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metadata

Metadata is structured data which describes the characteristics of a resource. Metadata is data about data (An item of metadata is itself data and therefore may have its own metadata). It shares many similar characteristics to the cataloguing that takes place in libraries, museums and archives. Metadata is essential for understanding information stored in data warehouses and has become increasingly important in XML-based Web applications. David Marco, another metadata theorist, defines metadata as “all physical data and knowledge from inside and outside an organization, including information about the physical data, technical and business processes, rules and constraints of the data, and structures of the data used by a corporation.”

Metadata is data associated with objects which relieves their potential users of having full advance knowledge of their existence or characteristics.

The term “meta” derives from the Greek word denoting a nature of a higher order or more fundamental kind. A metadata record consists of a number of pre-defined elements representing specific attributes of a resource, and each element can have one or more values. Below is an example of a simple metadata record:

Each metadata schema will usually have the following characteristics:

• A limited number of elements
• The name of each element
• The meaning of each element

Typically, the semantics is descriptive of the contents, location, physical attributes, type and form. Key metadata elements of documents include the originator of a work, its title, when and where it was published and the subject areas it covers. The resource community may also define some logical grouping of the elements or leave it to the encoding scheme. For example, Dublin Core may provide the core to which extensions may be added. When structured into a hierarchical arrangement, metadata is more properly called an ontology or schema.

Some of the most popular metadata schemas include:

• Dublin Core
• AACR2 (Anglo-American Cataloging Rules)
• GILS (Government Information Locator Service)
• EAD (Encoded Archives Description)
• IMS (IMS Global Learning Consortium)
• AGLS (Australian Government Locator Service)

There are hundreds of metadata schemas to choose from, as different communities seek to meet the specific needs of their members. While the syntax is not strictly part of the metadata schema, the data will be unusable, unless the encoding scheme understands the semantics of the metadata schema. The encoding allows the metadata to be processed by a computer program. Important schemes include:

• HTML (Hyper-Text Markup Language)
• SGML (Standard Generalised Markup Language)
• XML (eXtensible Markup Language)
• RDF (Resource Description Framework)
• MARC (MAchine Readable Cataloging)
• MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions)

Metadata may be deployed in a number of ways:

• In the Web page by the creator or their agent using META tags in the HTML coding of the page.
• As a separate HTML document linked to the resource it describes.
• In a database linked to the resource. The records may either have been directly created within the database or extracted from another source, such as Web pages.

The simplest method is for Web page creators to add the metadata as part of creating the page. Creating metadata directly in a database and linking it to the resource, is growing in popularity as an independent activity to the creation of the resources themselves. Increasingly, it is being created by an agent or third party, particularly to develop subject-based gateways.

Metadata has many different applications:

- It provides the essential link between the information creator and the information user.
-To improve resource discovery: to speed up and enrich searching for resources.
-To provide additional information to users of the data it describes. This information may be descriptive.
- It helps to bridge the semantic gap. By telling a computer how data items are related and how these relations can be evaluated automatically, it becomes possible to process even more complex filter and search operations.
-Certain metadata is designed to optimize lossy compression algorithms.
-Some metadata is intended to enable variable content presentation.
-Other can be used to automate workflows.
-Metadata has become important because of the need to find useful information from the mass of information available.

The metadata elements fall into three groups which roughly indicate the class or scope of information stored in them: (1) elements related mainly to the content of the resource, (2) elements related mainly to the resource when viewed as intellectual property, and (3) elements related mainly to the physical manifestation of the resource. See further in the page of Dublin Core (which has become the defacto Internet metadata standard) or the previous article

The <META> tag is not normally displayed by Web browsers, but can be viewed by selecting “Page Source”.

Which elements, sub-elements and schemes should be used?

The choice, it is normally based on:

• The specific needs of the local community to maximise information retrieval and management.
• The need to guard against making the creation of metadata and its maintenance more trouble than it is worth and therefore defeating its purpose.
• Sustainability of the metadata schema in terms of keeping the records up to date: It is not economical to start attaching metadata only after the production process has been completed.

The level of specificity in resource description is also important. The resources can be described individually or at a collection or aggregate level.

Consistent use of language with metadata descriptions can aid in the consistent discovery of resources.

Where will the metadata be stored?

-Metadata can be stored either internally, in the same file as the data, or externally, in a separate file.Metadata may be deployed in a number of ways:

• Embedding the metadata in the Web page by the creator or their agent using META tags in the HTML coding of the page
• As a separate HTML document linked to the resource it describes
• In a database linked to the resource. The records may either have been directly created within the database or extracted from another source, such as Web pages.

Creating metadata directly in a database and linking it to the resource, is growing in popularity as an independent activity to the creation of the resources themselves. Increasingly, it is being created by an agent or third party, particularly to develop subject-based gateways.

For metadata attached to Web pages, the standard encoding scheme is HTML (HyperText Markup Language). RDF (Resource Description Framework) supports multiple metadata schemes. It uses XML (EXtensible Markup Language) to express the structure.

How does one create metadata?

The more easily the metadata can be created and collected at point of creation of a resource or at point of publication, the more efficient the process and the more likely it is to take place. There are many such tools available and the number continues to grow. Some examples include:

• DC-dot – http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/dcdot/. This service will retrieve a Web page and automatically generate Dublin Core metadata, either as HTML tags or as RDF/XML, suitable for embedding in the section of the page.
• DCmeta – http://www.dstc.edu.au/RDU/MetaWeb/generic_tool.html. Developed by Tasmania Online. It is based on SuperNoteTab text-editor and can be customised.
• HotMeta – http://www.dstc.edu.au/Research/Projects/hotmeta/. A package of software, including metadata editor, repository and search engine.

Types of metadata

There are two distinct classes of metadata: structural or control metadata and guide metadata. Structural metadata is used to describe the structure of computer systems such as tables, columns and indexes. Guide metadata is used to help humans find specific items and is usually expressed as a set of keywords in a natural language.Metadata can be classified by:

• Content: Metadata can either describe the resource itself or the content of the resource.
• Mutability: Immutable or mutable (the “Scene description” does change).
• Logical function: There are three layers of logical function: subsymbolic layer, the symbolic layer and the logical one.

Digital library metadata

There are three categories of metadata that are frequently used to describe objects in a digital library [3][4]:

1. descriptive – Information describing the intellectual content of the object, finding aids or similar schemes. It is typically used for bibliographic purposes and for search and retrieval.
2. structural – Information that ties each object to others to make up logical units (e.g., information that relates individual images of pages from a book to the others that make up the book).
3. administrative – Information used to manage the object or control access to it. This may include information on how it was scanned, its storage format, copyright and licensing information, and information necessary for the long-term preservation of the digital objects.

In a nutshell, search engines, such as Google and HotBot, consist of a software package that crawls the Web, extracts and organises the data in a database. People can then submit a search query using a Web browser. The search engine locates the appropriate data in the database and displays it via the browser. This is not to be confused with directories such as Yahoo, that provide subject lists created by humans, that must be browsed. Search engines have three major elements:

• The spider: It visits a Web page, reads it, and then follows links to other pages within the site. The spider returns to the site on a regular basis, such as every month or two, to look for changes.
• The index. Everything the spider finds goes into the index. The index, is like a giant book containing a copy of every web page that the spider finds. If a web page changes, then this book is updated with new information.
• Search engine software. This is the program that sifts through the millions of pages recorded in the index to find matches to a search and rank them in order of what it believes is most relevant.

Search engine software is also available to run on a local Web site. The software has the same basic components, but the spider just visits the local site or a limited number of sites in a community.

Internet isn’t a search engine good enough

Because it popularisation in the mass media, the Web has become a two-edged sword. It is now very easy to publish information, but it is becoming more difficult to find relevant information. For outsiders and casual users, much of the useful material is difficult to locate and therefore is effectively unavailable.

The Working Group on Government Information Navigation outlined the problems with Internet search engines:

• relevant information can be missed because sites contain types of resource in addition to HTML text (e.g. images, databases, PDF documents);
• the search engines frequently do not harvest every page on a site, but often only the top two or three hierarchical levels, thus missing significant documents which, on larger and more complex sites, may be located in lower levels of the hierarchy;
• search engines, especially the more comprehensive ones, may index sites on an infrequent basis and may therefore not contain the most current data; and
• irrelevant information can be retrieved because the search engine has no means (or very few means) of distinguishing between important and incidental words in the document text.

The introduction of the <META> element as part of HTML coding, was in part, an attempt to encourage search engines to extract and index more structured data, such as description and keywords. However, search engines are rather proprietorial in recognising <META> tags. It ranges from no support at all, to reasonable. Details are available from Search Engine Watch [SEW].

Support for <META> tags by search engines designed for local Web servers varies from non-existent to good. Some of the specialist packages include support for Dublin Core or other metadata schemas.

Information taken from: http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/m/metadata.html

We have been dealing with many reference pages during our classes. Del.icio.us is a page where we can add our favourite links. I find it very useful, since in the explorer (either Firefox or Internet Explorer), although they already have an option where we can add a link to our favourite pages, if we add to many this option can become even disturbing. On the contrary, in del.icio.us, we have a right-column tags where we can divide our links into cathegories, in order to make our research easier. We can see those tags either in a cloud or in a list. The advantages of seeing them in a list is that the number of articles related to that theme is showed; while in the cloud, the most used tags are highlighted with a bigger size of letter, and they are showed in a smaller space. We can see an example of it in the account of Joseba Abaitua in del.icio.ous.

We have been also dealing with reference pages like Wiki. Some of the advantages of this page is the nice presentation it shows and the possibility to click on the links and go from one place to another (seeing different works, recent changes… ). But the most useful thing it offers is the possibility of comparing your own work, the evolution it has made, and the dates where those changes have been made (we can compare two versions of the same text saved on different dates, and see all the changes made -which appear in another colour-). Nevertheless, from my point of view, this page has a lot of dissadvantages: It takes a lot of time in making a nice presentation, putting internal and external links and fulfilling those pages in a proper way. Moreover, if you want to indent a paragraph, or put some words of the text in bold or in italics, you can’t see the changes in your text while you are writing, you just see two or three inverted commas, or asterisks surronding the words, which makes things no easy. You have to save what you are doing and see what you have done, make changes and see what you have done until you get the presentation you want. In comparison, Word programm is much more easy and fast, because you can see the presentation while you are writting. Moreover, with this wiki programm you have you save what you are doing constantly. If you spend a lot of time without saving your changes, it appears the page to login again, and you have lost all the work you have made (in many cases, clicking on the returning arrow, does not lead you to your previous work, which is fustrating). And the last dissadvantage of this page is, that as you can see other people’s work without any restrictions, many people can copy other people’s work and show it as his/her, just by introducing some little changesnd with no control.

The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative is an open organization engaged in the development of interoperable online metadata standards that support a broad range of purposes and business models.

As we can see it provides us with much more useful informations about the page, date of creation, and other things such as the following examples we can see in the page http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/

DCMI Metadata Terms

Each term is specified with the following minimal set of attributes:

Where applicable, the following attributes provide additional information about a term:

Information taken from: http://dublincore.org/

TAXONOMY

There are many systems (the traditional ones, like libraries and documentation centres; and the more new ones with its origin in the net) in order to class and to put into categories information.

Within the most traditional methods we can name: CDU, MARC, LCC/LCSH, DDC, IFLA y Bibtex

With the boom of Internet, the most important proposal is the well-known Dubline Core. Although the Open Archive Initiative deserves a special mention.

As well as these systems based on the notion of methadata, other ways of classifying information that resort to the use of ontologies are being incorporsated in the Net, one of the main objectives of the so-called demantic Web. Another interesting novelty is the development of the social systems of classification and the notion of folksonomym, that comes from them.

Folksonomy, is a neologism that gives name to the categorización colaborativa por medio de etiquetas simples en un espacio de nombres llano, sin jerarquías ni relaciones de parentesco predeterminadas. It’s a practice that that is produced in the environments of the social software, whose best exponents are the shared places like del.icio.us (favourite links), Flickr (photos), Tagzania (places), o 43 Things (wishes).”

Taxonomy is the practice and science of classification of things. The word comes from the Greek ( taxis, ‘order’ + nomos, ‘law’ or ’science’). Taxonomies, are composed of taxonomic units known as taxa (singular taxon), or kinds of things that are arranged frequently in a hierarchical structure, a tree structure of classifications for a given set of objects. Almost anything may be classified according to some taxonomic scheme. The term taxonomy may also apply to other relationship schemes, such as network structures with other types of relationships.

A taxonomy might also be a simple organization of kinds of things into groups, or even an alphabetical list (the term vocabulary is more appropriate for such a list). In current usage within “Knowledge Management“, taxonomies are seen as less broad than ontologies as ontologies apply a larger variety of relation types.

Anthropologists have observed that taxonomies are generally embedded in local cultural and social systems and serve various social functions.

Various taxonomies

In phylogenetic taxonomy (or cladistic taxonomy), organisms can be classified by clades, which are based on evolutionary grouping by ancestral traits. By using clades as the criteria for separation, cladistic taxonomy, can categorize taxa into unranked groups.

In numerical taxonomy or taximetrics, the field of solving or best-fitting of numerical equations that characterize all measurable quantities of a set of objects is called cluster analysis.

Non-scientific taxonomy

Other taxonomies are sometimes called folk taxonomies to distinguish them from scientific taxonomies that claim to be disembedded from social relations and thus objective and universal.

The neologism folksonomy should not be confused with “folk taxonomy” (though it is obviously a contraction of the two words). Those who support scientific taxonomies have recently criticized folksonomies by dubbing them “fauxonomies” (French word “faux” means “false”).

FOLKSONOMIES

(also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, social tagging, and other names) is the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content. Folksonomy is a distributed classification system with low entry costs.In contrast to traditional subject indexing, metadata is not only generated by experts but also by creators and consumers of the content. Usually, freely chosen keywords are used instead of a controlled vocabulary.

It is a portmanteau of the words folk and taxonomy that specifically refers to subject indexing systems created within Internet communities. According to Vander Wal, a folksonomy is “tagging that works”.

Folksonomy should be distinguished from folk taxonomy. Folk taxonomies are culturally supplied, intergenerationally transmitted, and relatively stable classification systems that people in a given culture use to make sense of the entire world around them^.

Folksonomies became popular on the Web with social software applications such as social bookmarking . Websites that support tagging and the principle of folksonomy are referred to in the context of Web 2.0 because participation is very easy and tagging data is used in new ways to find information. For example, tag clouds are frequently used to visualize the most used tags of a folksonomy. The term folksonomy is also used to denote only the set of tags that are created in social tagging.

Folksonomic tagging -typically, Internet-based- is intended to make a body of information increasingly easy to search, discover, and navigate over time. A well-developed folksonomy is ideally accessible as a shared vocabulary that is originated and familiar to its users. Two widely cited examples of websites using folksonomic tagging are Flickr and del.icio.us, although it has been suggested that Flickr is not a good example of folksonomy.

Part of the appeal of folksonomy is its inherent subversiveness: folksonomies can be seen as a rejection of the search engine status quo in favor of tools that are created by the community.

Folksonomy creation and searching tools are not part of the underlying World Wide Web protocols. Folksonomies arise in Web-based communities for creating and using tags in order to label and share user-generated content, such as photographs, Web sites, books, works in the scientific and scholarly literatures, and blog entries.

Folksonomy may hold the key to developing a Semantic Web, in which every Web page contains machine-readable metadata that describes its content. Such metadata would dramatically improve the precision in search engines. Few Web authors make use of the simple Dublin Core metadata standard, even though the use of Dublin Core meta-tags could increase their pages’ prominence in search engine retrieval lists.

Folksonomy is frequently criticized because of its lack of terminological control that it seems to be more likely to produce unreliable and inconsistent results, if tags are freely chosen instead of taken from a given vocabulary or inaccurate or irrelevant tags are used.

Idiosyncratic folksonomic classification, although considered beneficial by some, is viewed by others as a distinct limitation. For example, items tagged as “Web 2.0” represent a dizzying array of seemingly inconsistent and contradictory resources. The lack of a hierarchical or systematic structure for the tagging system makes the terms relevant to what they are describing, but often fails to show their relevancy or relationship to other objects of the same or similar type.

Folksonomy in the enterprise

Folksonomies are user-generated and therefore inexpensive to implement. It provides a useful low-cost alternative to more traditional, institutionally supported taxonomies or controlled vocabularies. It is useful in facilitating workplace democracy and the distribution of management tasks among people actually doing the work. As a distribution method, the folksonomy may facilitate workflow, but it does not guarantee that the information worker will tag.

Folksonomy and top-down taxonomies

Commentators and information architects have contrasted the hierarchical approach of top-down taxonomies with the folksonomy approach. The former approach is prevalent and represented by many practical examples.

One such example is Yahoo! — one of the earliest general directories for content on the Web. Yahoo! presented links under a fixed hierarchy.

Compromise with top-down taxonomies

It is possible that the differences between taxonomies and folksonomies have been overestimated. A possible solution to the shortcomings of folksonomies and controlled vocabulary is a collabulary. The result is a system that combines the benefits of folksonomies — low entry costs, a rich vocabulary that is broadly shared and comprehensible by the user base, and the capacity to respond quickly to language change — without the errors that inevitably arise in unsupervised folksonomies.

The ability to group tags, e.g. del.icio.us’s “bundles”, provides one way for taxonomists to work with an underlying folksonomy. Another possible solution is a taxonomy-directed-folksonomy, which relies on the user interfaces to suggest tags from a formal taxonomy, but allows many users to use their own tags.

ONTOLOGY

Is a study of conceptions of reality and the nature of being. Ontology (from the Greek “of being” and science, study, theory) is the study of being or existence and forms the basic subject matter of metaphysics. It seeks to describe or posit the basic categories and relationships of being or existence to define entities and types of entities within its framework. The first occurrence in English of “ontology” as recorded by the OED appears in Bailey’s dictionary of 1721, which defines ontology as ‘an Account of being in the Abstract’

Ontology concerns determining what categories of being are fundamental and asks whether, and in what sense, the items in those categories can be said to “be.”

The verb to be has many different meanings in different contexts and can therefore be rather ambiguous. Because “to be” has so many different meanings, there are, accordingly, many different ways of being.

All nouns refer to entities, collections, objects or events. In this latter view, mind, instead of referring to an entity, refers to a collection of mental events experienced by a person; society refers to a collection of persons with some shared interactions, and geometry refers to a collection of a specific kind of intellectual activity.

As a philosophical subject, ontology deals with the precise utilization of words as descriptors of entities or realities. Any ontology must give an account of which words refer to entities, which do not, why, and what categories result. The most basic problems in ontology are: finding a subject, a relationship, and an object to talk about.

Some basic questions

Ontology has one basic question: “What exists?”One common approach is to divide the extant entities into groups called “categories.” Ontology is applied to such fields as theology, information science and artificial intelligence.

Fundamental ontological concepts include:

• Universals
• Substance

Body and environment

Schools of subjectivism, objectivism and relativism existed at various times in the 20th century, and the postmodernists and body philosophers tried to reframe all these questions in terms of bodies taking some specific action in an environment. This relied to a great degree on insights derived from scientific research into animals taking instinctive action in natural and artificial settings—as studied by biology, ecology, and cognitive science.

The processes by which bodies related to environments became of great concern, and the idea of being itself became difficult to really define. Others, primarily philosophers, tried to dig into the word and its usage. Heidegger attempted to distinguish being and existence.

Ontological arguments are arguments from premises which are supposed to derive from some source other than observation of the world. This is, there are arguments from nothing but analytic, a priori and necessary premises to the conclusion that God exists. Issues of an ontological nature become of concern regarding discussions about possible descriptions of God. Anselm’s description of God is of “that of which nothing greater can be conceived.”

Ontology (computer science)

In both computer science and information science, an ontology is a data model that represents a set of concepts within a domain and the relationships between those concepts. It is used to reason about the objects within that domain.

Ontologies are used in artificial intelligence, the Semantic Web, software engineering, biomedical informatics and information architecture as a form of knowledge representation about the world or some part of it. Ontologies generally describe:

• Individuals: the basic or “ground level” objects, such as people, animals, things, molecules, and planets, as well as abstract individuals
• Classes: sets, collections, or types of objects. The classes of an ontology may be extensional or intensional in nature. A class is extensional if and only if it is characterized solely by its membership. If a class does not satisfy this condition, then it is intensional. A partition is a set of related classes and associated rules that allow objects to be placed into the appropriate class. If the partition rules ensure that every concrete object in the super-class is an instance of at least one of the partition classes, then the partition is called an exhaustive partition; if not, it is adisjoint partition.
• Attributes: properties, features, characteristics, or parameters that objects can have and share. The value of an attribute can be a complex data type. If you did not define attributes for the concepts you would have either a taxonomy (if hyponym relationships exist between concepts) or a controlled vocabulary. These are useful, but are not considered true ontologies.
• Relations: ways that objects can be related to one another. A tree-like structure (or, a partially ordered set) is the ‘child’ of a ‘parent class’. Another common type of relations is the meronymy relation, written as part-of, that represents how objects combine together to form composite objects.As well as the standard is-a and part-of relations, ontologies often include additional types of relation that further refine the semantics they model. These relations are often domain-specific and are used to answer particular types of question.
• Events: the changing of attributes or relations

Ontologies are commonly encoded using ontology languages.

Domain ontologies and upper ontologies

A domain ontology (or domain-specific ontology) models a specific domain, or part of the world. It represents the particular meanings of terms as they apply to that domain.

An upper ontology (or foundation ontology) is a model of the common objects that are generally applicable across a wide range of domain ontologies. It contains a core glossary in whose terms objects in a set of domains can be described. There are several standardized upper ontologies available for use, including Dublin Core, GFO, OpenCyc/ResearchCyc, SUMO, and DOLCEl. WordNet, while considered an upper ontology by some, is not an ontology: it is a unique combination of a taxonomy and a controlled vocabulary.

Since domain ontologies represent concepts in very specific and often eclectic ways, they are often incompatible.

At present, merging ontologies is a largely manual process and therefore time-consuming and expensive. Using a foundation ontology to provide a common definition of core terms can make this process manageable. There are studies on generalized techniques for merging ontologies, but this area of research is still largely theoretical.

Ontology languages

An ontology language is a formal language used to encode the ontology. There are a number of such languages for ontologies, both proprietary and standards-based:

• OWL is a language for making ontological statements, developed as a follow-on from RDF and RDFS, as well as earlier ontology language projects including OIL, DAML and DAML+OIL. OWL is intended to be used over the World Wide Web, and all its elements (classes, properties and individuals) are defined as RDF resources, and identified by URIs.
• KIF is a syntax for first-order logic that is based on S-expressions.
• The Cyc project has its own ontology language called CycL, based on first-order predicate calculus with some higher-order extensions.
• Rule Interchange Format (RIF) and F-Logic combine ontologies and rules.

In order to work with Ontology Languages, there is some useful technologies like Ontology Editor (to create ontologies using one of these languages), Ontology DBMS (to store and to query an ontology) and Ontology Warehouse (to integrate and to explore a set of related ontologies).

Relation to the philosophical term

The term ontology has its origin in philosophy, where it is the name of one fundamental branch of metaphysics, concerned with analyzing various types or modes of existence, often with special attention to the relations between particulars and universals, between intrinsic and extrinsic properties, and between essence and existence. According to Tom Gruber, the meaning of ontology in the context of computer science is “a description of the concepts and relationships that can exist for an agent or a community of agents.” An ontology is generally written, “as a set of definitions of formal vocabulary.”

What ontology has in common in both computer science and philosophy is the representation of entities, ideas, and events, along with their properties and relations, according to a system of categories.

Information taken from:

http://www.deli.deusto.es/wiki/index.php/Folk2onto

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxonomy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy

https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/dspace/bitstream/1794/3269/1/ccq_s ([PDF] Library of Congress controlled vocabularies and their application …