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12.2 Selecting an Ontology Language 285

Medical Personnel

Ontologist

Data Mining Tool

Authorization

Chart Database

Chart Ontology

Figure 12.1 Use case diagram for the medical chart ontology.

• Use case diagrams can specify who will use the ontology and how it will
  be used.

12.2 Selecting an Ontology Language

Ontology languages can be given a rough classification into three categories:

• Logical languages. These languages express knowledge as logical state-
  ments. One of the best-known examples of such an ontology language is
  the Knowledge Interchange Format (KIF) (Genesereth 1998).


• Frame-based languages.These languages are similar to database languages.
  Frame-based languages organize data using record-like structures called
  frames. As we saw in section 1.1, a database record consists of a series of
  data items called “fields.” In the same way, a frame consists of a series of
  data items calledslots. One of the best-known frame-based languages is
  KL-ONE (Brachman and Schmolze 1985).