For the Semantic Web context, ontology is the vocabulary,
terminology, and relationships of a topic area (Gomez-Perez, Fernandez-Lopez, &
Corcho, 2004). Ontology gives the meaning and context to information found in
Web resources (databases, etc.) for a specific domain of interest, using relationships
between concepts (Singh, Iyer, & Salam, 2005). According to Pisnalli, Gangemi,
Battaglia, and Catenacci (2004), ontologies should have:
0 Cannoy and Iyer
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1. logical consistency and be expressed in a ???logical language with an explicit
formal semantics.
2. semantic coverage such that it covers ???all entities from its domain.???
3. modeling precision and represent ???only the intended models for its domain of
interest.???
4. strong modularity for the domain??™s ???conceptual space. . .by organizing the
domain theories.???
5. scalability so that the language is expressive of intended meanings.
The domain of an ontology should include a taxonomy of classes, objects, and their
relations, as well as inference rules for associative power (Berners-Lee et al.
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