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Ontology Development 101: A Guide to Creating Your First Ontology
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Noy & McGuinness (2001) — the canonical practical guide. We keep a copy on hand.
Foundational papers
The lineage of the definition of “ontology,” in chronological order.
(1987). Logical Foundations of Artificial Intelligence. Morgan Kaufmann. — origin of “conceptualization.”
(1993). A Translation Approach to Portable Ontology Specifications. Knowledge Acquisition, 5(2), 199–220. — “an explicit specification of a conceptualization.” PDF
(1997). Construction of Engineering Ontologies for Knowledge Sharing and Reuse. PhD thesis, University of Twente. — “a formal specification of a shared conceptualization.”
(1998). Knowledge Engineering: Principles and Methods. Data & Knowledge Engineering, 25(1–2), 161–198. — “a formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualization.”
(1998). Formal Ontology in Information Systems. Proc. FOIS'98, IOS Press, 3–15. — the logical-theory view. PDF
(2001). Ontology Development 101: A Guide to Creating Your First Ontology. Stanford Knowledge Systems Laboratory, KSL-01-05. Local PDF · Stanford
(2011). MIREOT: The minimum information to reference an external ontology term. Applied Ontology, 6(1), 23–33.
W3C standards
The normative specifications for representing and reasoning over ontologies.
(2014). RDF 1.1 Concepts and Abstract Syntax. w3.org/TR/rdf11-concepts
(2014). RDF Schema 1.1. w3.org/TR/rdf-schema
(2012). OWL 2 Web Ontology Language — Document Overview (2nd ed.). w3.org/TR/owl2-overview
(2012). OWL 2 — Direct Semantics (2nd ed.). Defines the SROIQ-based semantics. w3.org/TR/owl2-direct-semantics
(2012). OWL 2 — Profiles (EL, QL, RL). w3.org/TR/owl2-profiles
(2009). SKOS Simple Knowledge Organization System — Reference. w3.org/TR/skos-reference
(2013). SPARQL 1.1 Query Language. w3.org/TR/sparql11-query
(2017). Shapes Constraint Language (SHACL). w3.org/TR/shacl
(2013). PROV-O: The PROV Ontology. w3.org/TR/prov-o
Description logic & foundations
(2003). The Description Logic Handbook. Cambridge University Press.
(2006). The Even More Irresistible SROIQ. Proc. KR 2006, 57–67. — the DL behind OWL 2 DL.
(2015). Building Ontologies with Basic Formal Ontology. MIT Press.
(2021). 21838-2: Top-level ontologies (TLO) — Basic Formal Ontology (BFO). iso.org
(2007). The OBO Foundry: coordinated evolution of ontologies to support biomedical data integration. Nature Biotechnology, 25, 1251–1255.