Pete Rivett, Federated Knowledge, Ontologist
Ora Lassila, Amazon Web Services, Principal Technologist
Margaret Warren, Metadata Authoring Systems, CEO/Founder

In today's AI and data-driven business landscape, “ontologies” serve as crucial tools for organizing and sharing knowledge across organizations. However, selecting them remains a challenging task. This workshop will detail a practical framework for making informed decisions about their adoption and take attendees through applying it to practical examples.

It will provide a spectrum of terms and how they’re differentiated, including glossary, taxonomy, vocabulary, schema, domain model, metamodel, knowledge graph and anything incorporating the word “semantics”.

It will detail different characteristics of ontologies that can be used as the basis for selecting between them, and the potential business benefits of each.

Part of this is the idea of ontology style which captures the idea of common conventions and emphases. For example some emphasize reasoning and formal consistency, others emphasize linked data.

One important area is top level ontologies, such as Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), and their potential benefits and drawbacks.

Finally it will cover considerations for choosing multiple ontologies that will need to work together, making use of the idea of ontology families.

This presentation is the result of several months of collaboration in the Dataworthy Collective™, which has included several long-time luminaries from the semantic web community, which will shortly be published as a full paper.