Researches on the organization of information have received more and more emphasis as the increased number of available data sources has compromised the retrieval of information. In the past few years, several studies have emphasized the use of ontologies as an alternative to information organization. This paper seeks to provide an overview of the state-of-the-art approaches regarding ontologies. Definitions and a brief discussion about the sense of the term are presented, as well as types of ontologies, proposals of applications in different knowledge domains and suggestions for the building up of ontologies (methodologies, tools and languages).
Ontologies; Information organization
