ok "ontology" -- a set of (explicitly named) concepts and categories in a subject area or domain that shows their properties and the relations between them.

This paper is in English but the authors may be from outside the english-speaking world. This gets both a note of respect, since the paper is on the subtle uses of language in a formal way, and is also a reminder that a giant percentage of the entire world does not speak English language, yet researchers may find these concepts and methods very useful for their own science progress.

With a stack of several hundred unsorted PDFs nearby, I begin to read about how to deeply and mathematically link the contents of formal papers. Immediately I am reminded of what others know so well -- the structure of the paper itself starts to appear in the linking.. so you have ontology of research paper layouts, and some standard for that. hmmm I am also immediately reminded that scientists describe science, which itself may be described. So you have ontology of science experiments, and on the other hand, ontology of references and prior arts publications.

With efficiency the authors march through a few well known acronyms, like OWL and non-acronym Dublin-core. The pages start to roll by and I can see the end coming, so now I know this is not a reference work really, but instead a dilligent graduate student review. Still interested, but seeing the limitations..

A good reference paper is a starting point to find those parts you are missing now.. this appears to be a good candidate for that, time allowing. It's worth revisiting whatever progress you the reader had made on OWL and Dublin-core in the past. Overall I am looking at the date of the paper, and shaking my head over the massive forward motion implemented and monetized in this information retrieval and search space, already.

People with a few years in the trade may recall a time before Facebook, and maybe before Google (I do). There was a sense in an earlier phase of computer science that people and small teams might make a dent in information retrieval, using modest, small scale standards like these mentioned. Somehow, with market and internet, those efforts link and the intellectual garden grows. Not so, instead, we collectively were steam-rolled by armies, laying down veritable four and six lane highways of information, with impenetrable inner-workings and simplistic, modern branding. A billion people now use services daily, that are built on these concepts, without ever a peep to them, of their inner workings, implementations and especially short-comings.

This paper probably got upvoted for the same reason a four-cylinder gas engine design would get upvoted.. for a nostalgia about when a serious inventor could try variations of that and actually mean something in the market. This paper is full of human-scale ideas for linking and classifying, while the world is now accustomed to network-scale implementations of these, as a service. As a person, I am reminded by reading and writing this, that I need to sort my pdfs manually and get on with it. At the same time, I encourage the majority of the world to take this English language work, its contents, and bring the concepts to your own literate fellows. The world is far too large to be one Internet information system alone.