Nine month progress report submitted for continuation towards a PhD
Toward a Canonical Method to Solve Patterns of Ontology Modelling Issues 4 ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________1. IntroductionThe original idea at the beginning of this PhD program was to evaluate and understand the current state of knowledge technologies, specifically ontology engineering, and assess if these technologies could be applied to the field of software engineering to assist development teams in improving the quality of the artifacts delivered along the software development process. The evaluation of the current state of ontology engineering, uncovered new areas of research interest linked to some of the difficulties encountered when following any of the methodologies available to create ontologies. One of such problems was laying out the initial ontology model once the glossary of terms pertaining to the domain knowledge was already available. Ontology creation methodologies provide some guidelines on how to approach this design step however they do not seem to provide enough level of detail on how to address certain modeling issues. This deficiency could lead ontology designers into making incorrect modeling choices having to rely on a subjective interpretation of the problem. The aim of this research is to explore this aspect of the ontology creation process in depth and try to propose better guidelines that could assist ontologists in solving specific design issues in a more deterministic, reproducible and objective manner. The content of this report is organized as follows: Section 2 presents a quick overview of the main concepts in ontology engineering in general. Section 3 describes the work undertaken from the beginning of this program relevant to the area of ontology modeling and finally, Section 4 outlines the conclusions gathered from this work and the possible lines of further investigation.2. The ProblemOntologies have emerged as one of the key components needed for the realization of the Semantic Web vision (Berners-Lee et al., 2001) and they bring with them a broad range of development activities that can be grouped into what is called Ontology Engineering. Ontology Engineering practices present many similarities to those in the Software Engineering field and there have been different adaptations of software engineering principles to the ontology engineering domain (Fernandez-Lopez et al., 1997). Below is a list of the most common ontology engineering practices and a brief description of the work that each one of them entails (Gòmez-Pérez et al., 2004)(Fernandez-Lopez, 2002)(Fernandez-Lopez et al., 1997). This list is not intended to be exhaustive given that new ontology engineering activities continue to appear as ontologies and the applications they are used for, keep on evolving.