These agreements are called ontologies. The interoperation
of more than one information system requires independent information
structures outside the interoperating system.
An ontology is an explicit formal specification of how to represent the objects,
concepts, and other entities that are assumed to exist in some area of interest and
the relationships that holds among them (Gruber, 1993a).
Berners-Lee (cited in Carvin, 2005) describes the Web as only achieving its full
potential when data can be shared and processed by automated tools. To achieve
this, the Semantic Web must contain machine-readable metadata describing the
data, relationships, and the knowledge domain of trusted sources. Defining metadata
of a domain to give a shared understanding of data elements results in a domain
ontology (Colomb, 2005).
An ontology can be represented as a hierarchical data structure showing the data
entities and their relationships and rules, and this data structure can be represented
in a language which is often based on XML, such as Resource Description Framework
(RDF) and OWL (Colomb, 2005).
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