Ontology design principles and normalization techniques in the web

Abstract

The fundamental issue of knowledge sharing in the web is the ability to share the ontological constrains associated with the Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI). To maximize the expressiveness and robustness of an ontological system in the web, each ontology should be ideally designed for a confined conceptual domain and deployed with minimal dependencies upon others. Through a retrospective analysis of the existing design of BioPAX ontologies, we illustrate the often encountered problems in ontology design and deployment. In this paper, we identify three design principles - minimal ontological commitment, granularity separation, and orthogonal domain - and two deployment techniques - intensionally normalized form (INF) and extensionally normalized form (ENF) - as the potential remedies for these problems. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.