Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Converting A Controlled Vocabulary Into An Ontology: The Case Of Gem, Jian Qin, Stephen Paling

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

The prevalance of digital information raised issues regarding the suitability of conventional library tools for organizing information. The multi-dimensionality of digital resources requires a more versatile and flexible representation to accommodate intelligent information representation and retrieval. Ontologies are used as a solution to such issues in many application domains, mainly due to their ability explicitly to specify the semantics and relations and to express them in a computer understandable language. Conventional knowledge organization tools such as classifications and thesauri resemble ontologies in a way that they define concepts and relationships in a systematic manner, but they are less expressive than …