In order for information systems supporting two different organizations to interoperate, there must be an agreement as to what the words mean. There are many such agreements in place, supporting information systems interoperation in many different application areas. Most of these agreements have been created as part of diverse systems development processes, but since the advent of the Semantic Web in the late 1990s, they have been studied as a kind of software artifact in their own right, called an ontology, or description of a shared world. This book brings together developments from philosophy, artificial intelligence and information systems to formulate a collection of functional requirements for ontology development. Once the functional requirements are established, the book looks at several ontology representation languages: RDFS, OWL, Common Logic and Topic Maps, to show how these languages support the functional requirements, what deficiencies there are, and how the languages relate to each other. Besides a collection of running examples used throughout the book, the entire treatment is supported by an extended example of a hypothetical ontology for the Olympic Games presented first as a set of chapter-end exercises and then as a set of solutions which illustrate the various points made in the text in the context of a single coherent development.

Deductive Databases and their Applications is an introductory text aimed at undergraduate students with some knowledge of database and information systems. The text comes complete with exercises and solutions to encourage students to tackle problems practically as well as theoretically. The author presents the origins of deductive databases in Prologue before proceeding to analyse the main deductive database paradigm - the data-log model. The final chapters are dedicated to closely related topics such as prepositional expert systems, integrity constraint specification and evaluation, and update propagation. Particular attention is paid to CASE tool repositories.

Aimed at undergraduate students, this introductory text works on the basis that the reader has only limited database and information systems knoledge. It comes complete with exercises and solutions to encourage students to tackle problems practically as well as theoretically. The author presents the origins of deductive databases in Prolog before proceeding to analyse the main deductive database paradigm-the datalog model. The final chapters are dedicated to closely related topics such as propositional expert systems, integrity constraint specification and evaluation, and update propogation. Particular attention is paid to CASE tool repositories. knowledge.