Later in the school, the focus turned to ontologies, which is where the true power of the semantic web lies. EUROLAN lecturers treated its potential in terms of what the topic of ontology development it might--and might not--bring to us in the future. This year's and how great its impact will really start somewhere, somehow, even if school was organized by the Faculty be. Although it is not yet clear what emerges is a variety of ontological of Computer Science at the A. I. Cuza whether the current vision of the semantic stores from which to choose. University of Iasi, the Research Institute web will indeed reach its expectations, The EUROLAN summer school also for Artificial Intelligence at the there are more and more included a workshop on ontologies Romanian Academy in Bucharest, opinions that it represents a major and information extraction, a student and the Department of Computer technological step that will permanently workshop on applied natural Science at Vassar College.

In numerous distributed environments, including today's World Wide Web, enterprise data management systems, large science projects, and the emerging semantic web, applications will inevitably use the information described by multiple ontologies and schemas. We organized the Workshop on Semantic Integration at the Second International Semantic Web Conference to bring together different communities working on the issues of enabling integration among different resources. The workshop generated a lot of interest and attracted more than 70 participants.

WEBODE is a scalable workbench for ontological engineering that eases the design, development, and management of ontologies and includes middleware services to aid in the integration of ontologies into real-world applications. WEBODE presents a framework to integrate new ontology-based tools and services, where developers only worry about the new logic they want to provide on top of the knowledge stored in their ontologies.

In this article, we discuss the general problems related to the semantic interpretation of WORDNET taxonomy in light of rigorous ontological principles inspired by the philosophical tradition. Then we introduce the DOLCE upper-level ontology, which is inspired by such principles but with a clear orientation toward language and cognition. We report the results of an experimental effort to align WORDNET's upper level with DOLCE. We suggest that such alignment could lead to an "ontologically sweetened" WORDNET, meant to be conceptually more rigorous, cognitively transparent, and efficiently exploitable in several applications.

In this issue, I have collected a fairly broad, although by no means exhaustive, sampling of work in the field of ontology research. To define a field is often quite difficult; it is more a collection of people and ideas than it is a specific technology. To represent our field, I present six articles that cover several of the major thrusts of ontology research from the past decade.

In this article, we discuss some issues that arise when ontologies are used to support corporate application domains such as electronic commerce (ecommerce) and some technical problems in deploying ontologies for real-world use. In particular, we focus on issues of ontology integration and the related problem of semantic mapping, that is, the mapping of ontologies and taxonomies to reference ontologies to preserve semantics. Along the way, we discuss what typically constitutes an ontology architecture. By its very nature, B2B e-commerce must try to interlink buyers and sellers from multiple companies with disparate product-description terminologies and meanings, thus serving as a paradigmatic case for the use of ontologies to support corporate applications.

In this article, we discuss some issues that arise when ontologies are used to support corporate application domains such as electronic commerce (ecommerce) and some technical problems in deploying ontologies for real-world use. In particular, we focus on issues of ontology integration and the related problem of semantic mapping, that is, the mapping of ontologies and taxonomies to reference ontologies to preserve semantics. Along the way, we discuss what typically constitutes an ontology architecture. We situate the discussion in the domain of business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce. By its very nature, B2B e-commerce must try to interlink buyers and sellers from multiple companies with disparate product-description terminologies and meanings, thus serving as a paradigmatic case for the use of ontologies to support corporate applications.

In this issue, I have collected a fairly broad, although by no means exhaustive, sampling of work in the field of ontology research. To define a field is often quite difficult; it is more a collection of people and ideas than it is a specific technology. To represent our field, I present six articles that cover several of the major thrusts of ontology research from the past decade.

The PROCESS SPECIFICATION language (PSL) has been designed to facilitate correct and complete exchange of process information among manufacturing systems, such as scheduling, process modeling, process planning, production planning, simulation, project management, work flow, and business-process reengineering. We give an overview of the theories within the PSL ontology, discuss some of the design principles for the ontology, and finish with examples of process specifications that are based on the ontology.

Despite its original intended use, which was very different, WORDNET is used more and more today as an ontology, where the hyponym relation between word senses is interpreted as a subsumption relation between concepts. In this article, we discuss the general problems related to the semantic interpretation of WORDNET taxonomy in light of rigorous ontological principles inspired by the philosophical tradition. Then we introduce the DOLCE upper-level ontology, which is inspired by such principles but with a clear orientation toward language and cognition. We report the results of an experimental effort to align WORDNET's upper level with DOLCE. We suggest that such alignment could lead to an "ontologically sweetened" WORDNET, meant to be conceptually more rigorous, cognitively transparent, and efficiently exploitable in several applications.