Ontologies for Astronomy

Ontologies are used in many application domains to organize information and described knowledge. Classifications and thesauri define concepts and relationships in a systematic manner and the ontologies are mainly used due to their ability to specify the semantics and relations between concepts and to express them in a computer understandable language. Astronomers regularly use information networks made up of electronic journal articles, databases and catalog servers. To go further, we are working on the definition of an ontology which would give intelligent access to the heterogeneous astronomical resources. This ontology will be used for different tasks such as intelligent information retrieval based on the content of documents and information manipulation for matching and comparing the content of these astronomical documents.