From Taxonomies to Ontologies

• Taxonomies are useful

  • Dmoz, Yahoo, et al.

• But they tend to be inexpressive

  • The are defined in very weak languages
  • The relation between class and class, and class and instance, and everything is explicit (mostly)
  • Fall prey to the Metacrap problems

• Rough rule:

  • If you need to classify, you have an ontology

Notes: