An ontology of sstronomical object types for the Virtual Observatory

Abstract

The Semantic Web and ontologies are emerging technologies that enable advanced knowledge management and sharing. Their application to Astronomy can offer new ways of sharing information between astronomers, but also between machines or software components and allow inference engines to perform reasoning on an astronomical knowledge base. The first examples of astronomy-related ontologies are being developed in the european VOTech project. © 2007 International Astronomical Union.