Ontological engineering: principles, methods, tools and languages

Resumen

In this chapter, we present the basics about ontologies, and show what activities should be carried out during the ontology development process, what principles should be followed in ontology design, and what methods, methodologies, software tools and languages are available to give support to each one of these activities. First, in Sect. 1.2, we define the word ‘ontology’ and we briefly explaining its roots in philosophy. Section 1.3 is devoted to explain which are the main components that can be used to model ontologies. In Sect. 1.4, we present the main ontology design principles. In Sect. 1.5, we describe the ontology development process in the context of the Semantic Web, where ontologies can be highly distributed and present many links among each other (hence the notion of networked ontologies). In Sect. 1.6, we describe the development of ontologies and the life cycle. In Sect. 1.7, we describe the methods, methodologies and tools commonly used for the whole ontology development process or only for specific activities. Among them we pay attention to those aimed at ontology learning, which reduce the effort needed during the knowledge ac1.Ontological Engineering: Principles, Methods, Tools and Languages 3quisition process; at ontology merging, which generates a unique target ontology from several source ontologies; at ontology alignment, which establishes different types of mappings between ontologies (hence preserving the original ones); and at ontology evaluation, which evaluates ontology content. In the implementation activity description, we present ontology languages that can be used to implement ontologies. Finally, conclusions and future lines of research are presented in Sect. 1.8.