Ontology increases the efficiency and consistency of describing resources, by enabling functionalities in development of knowledge management and information retrieval applications.Another type of relation is “part-of”, which represents how objects are combined to form composite objects. The is-a relationship creates hierarchical taxonomy, a tree like structure that clearly shows how objects are related to each other. This defines which objects are members of class of objects. The most important relation in ontology is the subsumption relation which includes “is-super class-of, is-subclass-of” and others. Relation connects two concepts or an object to a property.

The attributes have a name and a value.and is used to store information that is specific to the object.

In multiple inheritances all necessary properties of the subsuming classes are inherited by subsumed class.Īttributes are used to describe an object. In ontologies, the class which has a single parent is considered as single inheritance where as if a class has many parents it is considered as multiple inheritances. This means, anything that is necessarily true about the parent class must be necessarily true in a subsumed child class. The subsumed class (subclass) inherits the properties from the subsuming class (parent class). The parent class is the subsuming class and the subclass is the subsumed class. The subsumption relation creates hierarchy of classes. Ontologies vary based on whether a class can contain other class or whether a class can belong to itself.Ī class can be subsumed to another classes which is called as a subclass. Concepts are type, sort, category which include the abstract groups, sets and collection of objects. The individuals in an ontology may include concrete objects such as people, animals, tables, automobiles, molecules, and planets, as well as abstract individuals such as numbers and words.Ĭlasses are also referred to as concepts. They are the basic “ground level” components of ontology. Individuals are also referred to as instances. In ontology, concepts refer to objects, which will be organized, attributes are the traits of the objects, relationships connect two concepts and instances are the actual data in an information system. The components of ontology are individuals, classes, attributes and relationships. In computer science terms, ontology is defined as “an explicit specification of conceptualization”. It refers to the representation of various concepts and the relationships between these concepts. Ontology is a model of organized knowledge in a restricted domain.

Subsume means