Ontology Engineering - Overview

Overview

aims at making explicit the knowledge contained within software applications, and within enterprises and business procedures for a particular domain. Ontology engineering offers a direction towards solving the inter-operability problems brought about by semantic obstacles, i.e. the obstacles related to the definitions of business terms and software classes. Ontology engineering is a set of tasks related to the development of ontologies for a particular domain.

— Line Pouchard, Nenad Ivezic and Craig Schlenoff, Ontology Engineering for Distributed Collaboration in Manufacturing

Ontologies provide a common vocabulary of an area and define, with different levels of formality, the meaning of the terms and the relationships between them. During the last decade, increasing attention has been focused on ontologies. Ontologies are now widely used in knowledge engineering, artificial intelligence and computer science; in applications related to areas such as knowledge management, natural language processing, e-commerce, intelligent information integration, bio-informatics, education; and in new emerging fields like the semantic web. Ontological engineering is a new field of study concerning the ontology development process, the ontology life cycle, the methods and methodologies for building ontologies, and the tool suites and languages that support them.