Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Approximating Fol Ontologies Using Owl2, Robert W. Powell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

With the amount of data collected everyday ever expanding, techniques which allow com- puters to semantically understand data are growing in importance. Ontologies are a tool to describe the relationships connecting data so that computers can correctly interpret and combine data from many sources. An ontology about water needs to describe what the term "river" may refer to: An arbitrary river or one usable for navigation; a single tributary or an entire river network; the riverbed or the water itself? Well-designed ontologies can be shared, reused, and extended across multiple applications and facilitate betters integration of different data collections.

Common …