References

The ground truth.

Every definition in the Atlas traces back to one of these. The foundational papers that built the field, and the W3C standards that made it operational. Where a primary source is freely available, it's linked.

PDF
Ontology Development 101: A Guide to Creating Your First Ontology

Noy & McGuinness (2001) — the canonical practical guide. We keep a copy on hand.

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Foundational papers

The lineage of the definition of “ontology,” in chronological order.

Genesereth, M. R. & Nilsson, N. J. (1987). Logical Foundations of Artificial Intelligence. Morgan Kaufmann. — origin of “conceptualization.”
Gruber, T. R. (1993). A Translation Approach to Portable Ontology Specifications. Knowledge Acquisition, 5(2), 199–220. — “an explicit specification of a conceptualization.” PDF
Borst, W. N. (1997). Construction of Engineering Ontologies for Knowledge Sharing and Reuse. PhD thesis, University of Twente. — “a formal specification of a shared conceptualization.”
Studer, R., Benjamins, V. R. & Fensel, D. (1998). Knowledge Engineering: Principles and Methods. Data & Knowledge Engineering, 25(1–2), 161–198. — “a formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualization.”
Guarino, N. (1998). Formal Ontology in Information Systems. Proc. FOIS'98, IOS Press, 3–15. — the logical-theory view. PDF
Noy, N. F. & McGuinness, D. L. (2001). Ontology Development 101: A Guide to Creating Your First Ontology. Stanford Knowledge Systems Laboratory, KSL-01-05. Local PDF · Stanford
Courtot, M. et al. (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.

W3C (2014). RDF 1.1 Concepts and Abstract Syntax. w3.org/TR/rdf11-concepts
W3C (2014). RDF Schema 1.1. w3.org/TR/rdf-schema
W3C (2012). OWL 2 Web Ontology Language — Document Overview (2nd ed.). w3.org/TR/owl2-overview
W3C (2012). OWL 2 — Direct Semantics (2nd ed.). Defines the SROIQ-based semantics. w3.org/TR/owl2-direct-semantics
W3C (2012). OWL 2 — Profiles (EL, QL, RL). w3.org/TR/owl2-profiles
W3C (2009). SKOS Simple Knowledge Organization System — Reference. w3.org/TR/skos-reference
W3C (2013). SPARQL 1.1 Query Language. w3.org/TR/sparql11-query
W3C (2017). Shapes Constraint Language (SHACL). w3.org/TR/shacl
W3C (2013). PROV-O: The PROV Ontology. w3.org/TR/prov-o

Description logic & foundations

Baader, F., Calvanese, D., McGuinness, D., Nardi, D. & Patel-Schneider, P. (eds.) (2003). The Description Logic Handbook. Cambridge University Press.
Horrocks, I., Kutz, O. & Sattler, U. (2006). The Even More Irresistible SROIQ. Proc. KR 2006, 57–67. — the DL behind OWL 2 DL.
Arp, R., Smith, B. & Spear, A. D. (2015). Building Ontologies with Basic Formal Ontology. MIT Press.
ISO/IEC (2021). 21838-2: Top-level ontologies (TLO) — Basic Formal Ontology (BFO). iso.org
Smith, B. et al. (2007). The OBO Foundry: coordinated evolution of ontologies to support biomedical data integration. Nature Biotechnology, 25, 1251–1255.

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