The ontology engineering process – Study Related Research Publication
The ontology engineering process – Kinzig, Johannes (2017)
Study related research project for the module “Current Topics in High Integrity Systems”. This scientific paper describes the engineering process for developing ontologies and knowledge systems. It focuses on modeling techniques and how to gather knowledge from different sources.
Abstract
When Tim Berners-Lee started to develop the semantic web in the 1990s the general aim was that computers should "understand" the meaning or sense behind the content they were delivering. The overall purpose was to deliver the content which was requested by the user, faster and with a higher accuracy regarding the search terms. This was achieved by defining meta-data for contents and linking the meta-data.
In the former described scenario - the semantic web - it was mainly metadata for webpages. When the user was searching for a specific topic the search engine was able to parse the meta-data and also resolve the references which were given inside the meta-data (which linked to other corresponding meta-data). Then the user was provided with more relevant and significant content for his search.
Defining descriptive content is named ontology and was then adapted for describing other processes, applications or domains. The term ontology engineering then was established and describes the process for making up ontologies and complete ontology graphs for processes and applications. Thereby ontology engineering is not limited to technical processes or a special kind of data.
This paper describes the engineering process when developing an ontology or a complete knowledge system. The ontology engineering process will then also be compared with the technical engineering- and the software engineering lifecycle.
In addition, this paper will focus on the methods of gathering knowledge from different sources and on some modeling techniques. Software tools will be introduced shortly at the end but will not form the main part of this scientific paper.