Nine month progress report submitted for continuation towards a PhD
Toward a Canonical Method to Solve Patterns of Ontology Modelling Issues 6 ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________consistent with one another, although here, the sources involved will be kept separately (Noy and Musen, 2000). Reasoning. This activity deals with the study of the inferring capabilities of the produced ontology. Modularization. (Alan Rector)Out of all these aspects of ontology engineering, this report is primarily focussed in the ontology conceptualization task described above, and on the potential opportunities for improvement in the current state of the art. The idea is to study ontology modelling problems at a specific point in the conceptualization process. The first part of the conceptualization phase is to develop a glossary of terms representative of the domain knowledge obtained during the preceding knowledge acquisition phase. At this point, the construction of the model for the ontology starts and it is at this point that ontologists will have to solve different modelling issues to convert the glossary of terms into an ontology model. For example, what terms in the glossary should be modelled as classes? What terms should become properties, property values, or instances? This is the specific step in the conceptualization phase that this research is intended to focus on. The methodologies that address the creation of ontologies from scratch do not provide enough information at the right level of detail about this specific step of the ontology conceptualization phase (Gòmez-Pérez et al., 2004)(Fernandez-Lopez et al., 2002)(Uschold and King, 1995)(Gruninger and Fox, 1995). They look at this activity in broader terms, from a higher level perspective, or from the point of view of what role in the overall ontology engineering lifecycle it plays and what dependencies it has with other engineering activities. Different methodologies provide different levels of detail on how ontology conceptualization should be performed, but none of them discuss in depth the possible modelling problems stated earlier (or their solutions), that ontologists may be faced with, at that specific point of the ontology creation process. Two examples of previous work that examine ontology modelling issues in the context demanded by this research, can be found in (Noy, 2004) and in (Noy and McGuinness, 2001), which in turn, bases part of its rationale on the principles of object-oriented modelling (Rambaugh et al., 1991). Lastly, in the next section it is introduced a sample case scenario of some ontology modelling issues to illustrate the type of problem described here.