Ontology

• Remember that the state of the art in AI systems is limited by domain.
• A system can do things that appear intelligent as long as it works in a restricted domain.
• One way to encode knowledge in that restricted domain is an ontology. (See the Ontology Wiki.)
• An ontology is a description of a domain.
• Some ontologies, like Cyc, try to represent everything. They fail but, Cyc for example, supplies useful data for reuse.
• Wordnet has an ontology for a large number of words in English and other languages.
• You can add things to semantic nets to build a more sophisticated system.
• Ontologies relate to XML.