THE ONTOLOGIES FOUND IN THIS DIRECTORY ARE THE OLD, OBSOLETE VERSIONS. WE KEEP THEM HERE FOR ARCHIVAL PURPOSES ONLY. PLEASE FIND THE NEW VERSIONS OF THE ONTOLOGIES ON THE ONTOLINGUA SERVER http://ontolingua.stanford.edu

Sharable Ontology Library

This used to be a static library but is now available through the

KSL Interactive Ontology Server

The Interactive Ontology Server has many new and updated ontologies; the static versions are now out of date.

This is an electronic library of public ontologies. Ontologies are specifications of conceptualizations, used to help programs and humans share knowledge [2]. In practice they consist of definitions of representational vocabulary, some including axiomatic theories. Most of the files here are in a machine-readable form: KIF [1] sentences in forms that Ontolingua [2] can translate into implemented representation languages.

Browsing the Ontology Library

The ontologies are available in the form of cross-indexed hypertext documents. The web comprising all the available ontologies and accompanying documentation is found in the /html subdirectory, starting with the
Ontology Library Table of Contents
Look at the Reference Documents section of the index first; these documents introduce and link into the ontologies. This cross indexing service was performed by the latest Ontolingua tools.

Downloading the Ontologies

The ontologies are also available in this directory by anonymous ftp. The root of the ftp ontology library is
ksl.stanford.edu: /pub/knowledge-sharing/ontologies/

It is suggested that you browse the ontologies in their nice, hypertext form first (see above) and then download them in the form you need.

The following files contain the ontology library in various languages:

Note: It is very possible that the .tar.Z files will be older than the latest offerings in hypertext form. Check the file dates carefully. To get the latest individual ontolingua source document, you can view the source file from the hypertext interface and then use your WWW browser to save it as a plain text file.

If you live behind a firewall, (i.e., you can't access internet addresses outside your site) then ftp the file html-ontologies.tar.Z from this directory. It contains the ontology web as a self-contained directory of files that you can browse locally using a WWW browser such as Mosiac.

The ontologies posted here may change and no claims or warrants are made. They may be copyrighted, but the authors give permission to freely distribute the files with the copyright label intact.

Contributing to the Ontology Library

We welcome additions to the ontology library. There is now a reasonable body of examples to work from. The procedure for contributing an ontology is described in how-to-submit-an-ontology.html.

For More Information

[1]
M. R. Genesereth, R. E. Fikes (Editors). Knowledge Interchange Format, Version 3.0 Reference Manual. Computer Science Department, Stanford University, Technical Report Logic-92-1, March 1992. Available on line.

[2]
T. R. Gruber. A Translation Approach to Portable Ontology Specifications. Knowledge Acquisition, 5(2):199-200, 1993. Available on line.

See also the WWW-resident

Tom Gruber