Practical Ontologies for Information Professionals

Practical Ontologies for Information Professionals provides an accessible introduction and exploration of ontologies and demonstrates their value to information professionals.

More data and information is being created than ever before. Ontologies, formal representations of knowledge with rich semantic relationships, have become increasingly important in the context of today’s information overload and data deluge. The publishing and sharing of explicit explanations for a wide variety of concepts, in a machine readable format, has the power to both improve information retrieval and discover new knowledge. Information professionals are key contributors to the development of new, and increasingly useful, ontologies.

Practical Ontologies for Information Professionals provides an accessible introduction to the following:
- defining the concept of ontologies and why they are increasingly important to information professionals
- ontologies and the semantic web
- existing ontologies, such as RDF, RDFS, SKOS, and OWL2
- adopting and building ontologies, showing how to avoid repetition of work and how to build a simple ontology
- interrogating ontologies for reuse
- the future of ontologies and the role of the information professional in their development and use.

1. What is an ontology? 
. Introduction 
. The data deluge and information overload 
. Defining terms 
. Knowledge organization systems and ontologies 
. Ontologies, metadata and linked data 
. What can an ontology do? 
. Ontologies and information professionals 
. Alternatives to ontologies 
. The aims of this book 
. The structure of this book 

2. Ontologies and the semantic web 
. Introduction 
. Resource description framework (RDF)
. Classes, subclasses and properties 
. The semantic web stack 
. Embedded RDF 
. Alternative semantic visions 
. Libraries and the semantic web 
. Other cultural heritage institutions and the semantic web 
. Other organizations and the semantic web 
. Conclusion 

3. Existing ontologies 
. Introduction 
. Ontology documentation 
. Ontologies for representing ontologies 
. Ontologies for libraries 
. Upper ontologies 
. Basic formal ontology 
. Cultural heritage data models 
. Ontologies for the web
. Conclusion 

4. Adopting ontologies 
. Introduction 
. Reusing ontologies: application profiles and data models 
. Identifying ontologies 
. The ideal ontology discovery tool 
. Selection criteria 
. Conclusion 

5. Building ontologies 
. Introduction 
. Approaches to building an ontology 
. The twelve steps 
. Ontology development example: Bibliometric Metrics Ontology element set 
. Conclusion 

6. Interrogating ontologies 
. Introduction 
. Interrogating ontologies for reuse 
. Interrogating a knowledge base 
. Understanding ontology use 
. Conclusion 

7. The future of ontologies and the information professional 
. Introduction 
. The future of ontologies for knowledge discovery 
. The future role of library and information professionals 
. The practical development of ontologies 
. Conclusion 

Bibliography

This book will be essential reading for information professionals in libraries and other cultural heritage institutions who work with digitization projects, cataloguing and classification and information retrieval. It will also be useful to LIS students who are new to the field. 

David Stuart is an independent information professional and an honorary research fellow at the University of Wolverhampton, and was previously a research fellow at King's College London and the University of Wolverhampton. He regularly publishes in peer-reviewed academic journals and professional journals on information science, metrics, and semantic web technologies, and in 2015 began writing a regular column for the journal Online Information Review called 'Taming Metrics'.