Programmers are used to solving problems in code. So if they are not used to ontology, it is easy to understand how much of a challenge it could be to them. DATAVERSITY brought this interesting topic to us in their article, “The Knowledge Representation Corner: Procedural vs. Declarative.”

Ontologies on the semantic web are by nature decentralized. From the body of ontology mapping approaches, we can draw a conclusion that an effective approach to automate ontology mapping requires both data and metadata in application domains.

The choice of language used to represent terms, definitions, and facts is designed to implement a solution, and that isn’t always about being efficient and effective. Turing equivalence is about procedural languages that specify the steps to accomplish something. However, logical languages specify what is true, rather than a series of steps to perform.

This feels like it is getting deep in the weeds, but at the end of the day a combination of declarative and procedural representation based on ontologies favors the analysis and implementation for ontology mapping.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.