An ontology is, according to Tom Gruber, "the specification of conceptualizations, used to help programs and humans share knowledge.".
In this usage, an ontology is a set of concepts - such as things, events, and relations - that are specified in some way (such as specific natural language) in order to create an agreed-upon vocabulary for exchanging information.
The manual building of ontologies
still remains a tedious, cumbersome task which can easily result in a knowledge
acquisition bottleneck. The success of the Semantic Web strongly depends on the
proliferation of ontologies, which requires that the engineering of ontologies be
completed quickly and easily.
A method which has proven
to be extremely beneficial for the knowledge acquisition task is the integration of
knowledge acquisition with machine learning techniques.
