Advantages of Ontologies

The following are the advantages of Ontologies:

• Increased quality of entity analysis
• Increased use, reuse, and maintainability of the information systems
• Facilitation of domain knowledge sharing, with common vocabulary across independent software applications

Those who are familiar with the object-oriented programming paradigm or database design can easily relate the Ontological representation of the domain entities to classes or database schemas. The classes are generic representations of the entities that encapsulate properties and behaviors. One class can inherit behavior and properties from another class (is-a relationship). For example, a cat is an animal.

In this case, Animal is an abstract superclass of Cat. The Cat class inherits properties from the Animal class and adds/overrides some of the attributes and behaviors specific to a cat. This paradigm is applicable in Ontologies. Similarly, relational databases have schematic representations of the domain entities within an organization.

There are some fundamental differences between databases and Ontologies, as follows:

•  Ontologies are semantically richer than the concepts represented by databases
• Information representation in an Ontology is based on semi-structured, natural language text and it is not represented in a tabular format
• The basic premise of Ontological representation is globally consistent terminology to be used for information exchange across domains and organizational boundaries 
• More than defining a confined data container, Ontologies focus on generic domain knowledge representation