This glossary summarizes the terminology of methods and techniques for defining, sharing, and merging ontologies. These definitions, which were written by John F. Sowa, are based on discussions in the ontology working group of the NCITS T2 Committee on Information Interchange and Interpretation.
As an example, a black cat and an orange cat would be considered very similar as instances of the category Animal, since their common catlike properties would be the most significant for distinguishing them from other kinds of animals. But in the category Cat, they would share their catlike properties with all the other kinds of cats, and the difference in color would be more significant. In the category BlackEntity, color would be the most relevant property, and the black cat would be closer to a crow or a lump of coal than to the orange cat. Since prototype-based ontologies depend on examples, it is often convenient to derive the semantic distance measure by a method that learns from examples, such as statistics, cluster analysis, or neural networks.
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