Ontology is a controlled, hierarchical vocabulary for describing a knowledge system or knowledge-handling methods.

This chapter is an introduction to a development paradigm in which software and knowledge engineering are integrated. As always happens on the other side of an economic crisis, a new set of skills will be required. A growing number of developers will actively use the knowledge technologies reviewed in this chapter.

The chapter starts by talking about fundamental standards that currently bridge ontology and engineering: the Resource Description Framework (RDF), the Semantic Web language DAML+OIL (DARPA Agent Markup Language + Ontology Inference Layer), Topic Maps concepts, and their XML Topic Maps (XTM) standard knowledge exchange format.

We'll continue with a brief overview of data-mining methods with coming Java support and eventually discuss the challenging topic of generic knowledge, not just knowledge of a specific business domain, expressed in natural language. The final part of the chapter describes OpenCyc, probably the most exciting knowledge instrument today, and provides examples of using the CycL language and OpenCyc engine in distributed knowledge systems.

I hope this chapter does not take you, my reader, by surprise. Integration-ready systems and collaborative engineering need and help create knowledge technologies, which create a very healthy cycle.

A customer with a computer and computer skills is still the main target for computerized services today.

Even when searching Google.com for a specific topic, you need to know the specific terms of the industry this topic belongs to.