The Handbook on Ontologies provides a comprehensive overview of the current status and future prospects of the field, which has developed significantly in the five years since the first edition. Revisions here include 21 completely new chapters.

Ontology Representation Languages.- What Is an Ontology?.- Description Logics.- Ontologies in F-Logic.- Resource Description Framework.- Web Ontology Language: OWL.- Ontologies and Rules.- Ontology Engineering.- Ontology Engineering Methodology.- Ontology Engineering and Evolution in a Distributed World Using DILIGENT.- Formal Concept Analysis.- An Overview of OntoClean.- Ontology Design Patterns.- Ontology Learning.- Ontology and the Lexicon.- Ontology Evaluation.- Ontology Engineering Environments.- Exploring the economical aspects of ontology engineering.- Ontologies.- Foundational Choices in DOLCE.- An Ontology for Software.- COMM: A Core Ontology for MultimediaAnnotation.- Using the PSL Ontology.- Ontologies for Formal Representation of Biological Systems.- Ontologies for Cultural Heritage.- Ontologies.- RDF Storage and Retrieval Systems.- Tableau-Based Reasoning.- Resolution-Based Reasoning for Ontologies.- Ontology Repositories.- Ontology Mapping.- Ontology based Infrastructureand Methods.- Ontologies and Software Engineering.- Semantic Web Services.- Ontologies for Machine Learning.- Information Extraction.- Browsing and Navigation in Semantically Rich Spaces.- Ontology based Applications.- Ontologies for Knowledge Management.- Application of Ontologies in Bioinformatics.- Semantic Portals for Cultural Heritage.- Ontology-Based Recommender Systems.

An ontology is a formal description of concepts and relationships that can exist for a community of human and/or machine agents. The notion of ontologies is crucial for the purpose of enabling knowledge sharing and reuse. The Handbook on Ontologies provides a comprehensive overview of the current status and future prospectives of the field of ontologies considering ontology languages, ontology engineering methods, example ontologies, infrastructures and technologies for ontologies, and how to bring this all into ontology-based infrastructures and applications that are among the best of their kind. The field of ontologies has tremendously developed and grown in the five years since the first edition of the Handbook on Ontologies. Therefore, its revision includes 21 completely new chapters as well as a major re-working of 15 chapters transferred to this second edition.

“The book gives both a nice introduction and an overview of this field for beginners and is also helpful for knowledge management and Semantic Web experts. It makes clear the enormous potential of ontologies and discusses relevant problems for the use and dissemination of ontological methods.” (Wolfram Sperber, zbMATH 1429.68001, 2020)From the reviews: "General impression is that the Handbook on Ontologies in Information Systems provides a comprehensive overview of the current status and future prospectives of the field of ontologies. The handbook demonstrates standards that have been created recently, it surveys methods that have been developed and it shows how to bring both into practice of ontology infrastructure and applications that are the best of theirkind. … With its coverage of research and applications it provides valuable insights, both for researchers and practitioners." (Jaroslav Veselý, Neural Network World, Issue 1, 2005) "The handbook is formed as a collection of papers written by many authors. These papers are collected into chapters devoted to separate problems of ontologies. … This book presents an interesting collection of information about all aspects of ontology processing and applications and also references to other information sources from this field." (Tomas Brandejsky, Neural Network World, Vol. 14 (6), 2004) From the reviews of the second edition: “The focus is on theory, construction techniques used by researchers, and research prototypes. … The content of the book is largely condensed from the research literature … . The researcher or student who wants details about formalisms and techniques … this book provides a good starting point for further investigations and a reasonably up-to-date summary of current knowledge … . The book should be useful to researchers in this and related areas, as well as practitioners of knowledge management and information modeling in various domains.” (R. M. Malyankar, ACM Computing Reviews, March, 2010)