How to Manage Content Ontologies More Effectively

Terminology and ontologies

Save the heart of your company's knowledge through ontologies.

Terminology and ontologies or how to better manage and exploit the knowledge of companies?

Can an ontology help you structure the vocabulary of your core business?

An ontology to structure your strategic vocabulary?

Terminology management has become a real challenge for all companies, for the sake of the simple reason that the effectiveness of communication depends on it. One of the pillars of sharing terminology is the structure and standardization of terminology bases. However, we usually simply store in successive entries terms accompanied by their definition with, possibly, an associated translation. We can easily discern the limitations of this type of storage. Thus, how could we create a richer and more hierarchical terminology base, in which all the collaborators of a project could easily find a term and all the concepts associated with it?

One of the solutions (and for many, the most promising) could be the creation of an ontology. Ontology, which is originally very used in the world of artificial intelligence, applies today in many fields. In this case, it is proving to be particularly effective and it is surely for this reason that it has had a strong interest in collaborative engineering since the 1990s.

Indeed, ontology is defined as The specification of a conceptualisation of a field of knowledge(Gruber). More simply, it creates a structured database in which it is possible to classify elements by categories and sub-categories, add definitions to each element, put attributes and create all types of links (semantic or linguistic) between elements and categories. It is therefore very easy to create a comprehensive terminology base to ensure the quality of communication and the consolidation of our terminology.

Moreover, and far from negligible, data stored in ontology can be easily reused by other applications. Let us take a simple example: a company designs software to monitor buildings. This software system requires an installation composed of different devices (sensors, etc.). This company creates an ontology to record the names and definitions of its products, it adds the necessary translations to its base. The coherence and consensus that this ontology creates will only be one more for customers. On the other hand, let us imagine that she wishes to place on her website an online shop where all her products would be available. There is no need to create a new database since ontology already exists. The ontology allows not only to present its products in a coherent and structured way facilitating the navigation of customers, but also, thanks to the links previously created, to propose the possible configurations of the products. It is on the same principle that Amazon.com is based: the prior categorization of works and authors allows users to suggest related readings.

Several tools are used to create ontologies. We will retain among them the two Free Software Protected and Swoop. Of course the mastery of this methodology and these tools requires a little practice but the benefits that can be gained from it are certainly worth it!

For more information on terminology management, you can consult the following sources:

• How and why create an ontology? http://protege.stanford.edu/publications/ontology development/ontology101-noy-mcguinness.html

• Swoop: http://www.mindswap.org/papers/SWOOP-Poster.pdf

• http://www.archigag.com/watch-documentation/2015/09/21/find-taxonomy-thesaurus-ontology