Brian Lowe will present a gentle introduction to ontologies, as the second of a trilogy of related forums. In September, Keith Jenkins began the trilogy with a discussion of statement-based models for data and metadata, where traditional "records" are broken up into sets of simple statements. This discussion of ontologies will prepare us for the final forum of the trilogy, on the Semantic Web, to be presented later this spring.

The word "ontology" is increasingly bandied about in the metadata and information science communities, referring to a structured way of representing knowledge about a particular domain.

But what exactly are ontologies?
(And what was that statement business all about again?)

What can ontologies do for the library?

How do VIVO and related projects use ontologies?

How can ontologies help software to "understand" the meaning of data or metadata?

What are RDF Schema and OWL (the Web Ontology Language), and what do they offer?

We'll attempt to address these questions and others as we begin to explore the building blocks of the Semantic Web in greater depth.