Chapter 13 - Ontologies on the Web—putting it all together

Abstract

This chapter discusses three ontologies: Good Relations, Quantities/Units/Dimensions/Types (QUDT), and OBO Foundry. These ontologies cover the spectrum from ontologies that include almost no data at all (Good Relations) to ontologies that include very large amounts of richly interconnected data (OBO). They all supply the basic capabilities of the Semantic Web by sharing information in a coherent way across multiple systems. Good Relations is the smallest of the ontologies described in the chapter. Its main goal in the Semantic Web is to provide a framework in which information can be shared—a vocabulary that different suppliers can use to describe their offerings. The data in Good Relations aren’t in the ontology at all; it is distributed across the Web. OBO Foundry ontologies, in contrast, are larger, and include large amounts of data about biology, medicine, life sciences, etc. There are complex questions that can be answered using OBO as a data resource. QUDT sits in the middle; it contains a good deal of data, but its main purpose is to provide connection between other data sets; two data sources that both use Good Relations might still fail to be interoperable because of mismatch of units; QUDT provides enhanced interoperability in these cases. All three of these ontologies play the basic role in the Semantic Web of providing globally unambiguous names for standard entities—they differ only in the details of how these relationships can be used.