International Business Machines (IBM) was awarded a patent for method and system for generating an ontology. The co-inventors are Rama Kalyani Akkiraju, San Jose, Calif., Richard T. Goodwin, Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., Hui Guo, East Elmhurst, N.Y., and Anca-Andreea Ivan, San Jose, Calif.
This interesting information was found on MSP News in their article, “U.S. Patents Awarded to Inventors in New York (Sept. 28).” Ontology is a view of a domain hierarchy, the similarity of relationships and their interaction among concepts. An ontology does not define the vocabulary or the way in which it is to be assigned. It illustrates the concepts and their relationships so that the user more easily understands its coverage.
The patent was awarded for the method of generating an ontology. As knowledge organization systems increase in complexity, we have increasing numbers of dimensions or features or ways to define the terms. So if an ontology is a description of the concepts and relationships that can exist, this new “method” of generation will be interesting to review.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in taxonomies, metadata, and semantic enrichment to make your content findable.
