Editor's Note: An update to this article has been posted here on 7/14/04. As the hype of past decades fades, the current heir to the artificial intelligence legacy may well be ontologies. Evolving from semantic network notions, modern ontologies are proving quite useful. And they are doing so without relying on the jumble of rule-based techniques common in earlier knowledge representation efforts. These structured depictions or models of known (and accepted) facts are being built today to make a number of applications more capable of handling complex and disparate information. They appear most effective when the semantic distinctions that humans take for granted are crucial to the application's purpose.

Communicative What does it mean to be able to communicate with someone (or something, in the computational case)? Greatly simplifying an issue which has been a cornerstone of intellectual thought for many years, useful communication requires shared knowledge. While this includes knowledge of a language the words and syntactic structures it is even more focused on knowledge about the problem being solved. To deal with a travel agent, you need to be able to talk about travelling, to interact with a florist you need some knowledge of flowers, and to deal with an internet agent you must share a vocabulary about the area of concern. A key problem with current search engines is that although based in language, they have no knowledge of the domains of interest. Searching physics papers would be enhanced if the search engine actually'knew' something about physics (how experiments are performed, which words are ambiguous, whether papers are theorerical or empirical, etc.), rather than simply looking for the appearance of key words.

This is an updated version of Usability Issues in Description Logic Systems'' published in Proceedings of International Workshop on Description Logics, Gif sur Yvette, (Paris), France, September, 1997.

Class: A class defines a group of individuals that belong together because they share some properties. For example, Deborah and Frank are both members of the class Person. Classes can be organized in a specialization hierarchy using subClassOf. There is a built-in most general class named Thing that is the class of all individuals and is a superclass of all OWL classes. There is also a built-in most specific class named Nothing that is the class that has no instances and a subclass of all OWL classes.

This document has been reviewed by W3C Members and other interested parties, and it has been endorsed by the Director as a W3C Recommendation. W3C's role in making the Recommendation is to draw attention to the specification and to promote its widespread deployment. This enhances the functionality and interoperability of the Web. This is one of six parts of the W3C Recommendation for OWL, the Web Ontology Language. It has been developed by the Web Ontology Working Group as part of the W3C Semantic Web Activity (Activity Statement, Group Charter) for publication on 10 February 2004.

A proposed standard for specifying and exchanging ontologies, drawing together ideas from Web languages (e.g., XML, RDF), Description Logics, and frame-based systems. OKBC - The Open Knowledge Base Connectivity Protocol (formerly called GFP, the Generic Frame Protocol). OK Station (in French) - The Ontological Knowledge Station, a commercial modeling tool dedicated to the acquisition, definition and manipulation of knowledge bases and ontologies, based on the OK ontological model (Univ Savoie, France). OMCSNet - A semantic network derived from the OpenMind commonsense database, now superceded by the more recent OpenMind derivative knowledge base ConceptNet. ON9 - The ontology library at the Laboratory for Applied Ontology (Italy), developed using the ONIONS methodology and implemented in Loom.

An ontology is an explicit specification of a conceptualization. The term is borrowed from philosophy, where an Ontology is a systematic account of Existence. For AI systems, what "exists" is that which can be represented. When the knowledge of a domain is represented in a declarative formalism, the set of objects that can be represented is called the universe of discourse. This set of objects, and the describable relationships among them, are reflected in the representational vocabulary with which a knowledge-based program represents knowledge.

This ontology is available under the terms of the GNU General Public License. It consists of 21,521 concepts and 37,162 assertions and is part of the ThoughtTreasure artificial intelligence program/tool set, which contains much else besides the ontology.

An Artbotics with Lego Mindstorms EV3 workshop is being held for educators at UC Irvine in California on Saturday, December 5, 2015. For more information, look here: http://artbotics-uci.eventbrite.com Two Artbotics workshops using the newly developed Arduino curriculum will be held as part of the Middlesex Community College Summer Bridge 2015 program on August 4 and 18, 2015.

Selena Gomez and rumored boyfriend The Weeknd were certified newsmakers this week. But what's more interesting about this developing story was the latest report highlighting the sex life and nontraditional views on love and marriage of Gomez's new lover. In a recent interview with GQ magazine, the publication that labeled The Weeknd as the "king of sex pop," the 26-year-old "Starboy" singer candidly spoke about his own views on love and marriage. The Grammy Award-winning musician said his popularity does not affect his ego and his dating game, saying most girls want to get involve with him because of his talents instead of appearance. "The reason why they want to [have sex] with me is because of what I do [in the studio]," The Weeknd said in an interview for GQ's February 2017 issue, Us Weekly quoted.