Vocabularies and ontologies

• But what is "medicine"?
  • a specific product
  • the active principle
  • a class of products
  • ...
• We must share:
  • vocabularies
  • ontologies

Standard vocabularies are not the solution:

• defining standard vocabularies is difficult and time consuming
• once defined, standards don't adapt well
• people don't implement standards correctly anyway

Ontology is ...

• a specific artifact designed with the purpose of expressing the intended meaning of a vocabulary (N. Guarino)
• a set of knowledge terms, including the vocabulary, the semantic interconnections and some simple rules of inference and logic for some particular topic (J. Hendler)