Ontology Resources

This section is intended as a minor source of ontology-related material. It is not a comprehensive list (there is much out there!!) but rather a glimpse at what an ontology is and what is going on regarding ontology research...

Take it as a starting point and feel free to look for additional materials ....

Note: Links will only work for ASLab researchers -due to dissemination restrictions- but the files can be found at author's sites.

WHAT IS AN ONTOLOGY

There is not an unique answer to this question. It is a word from Ancient ages (i.e. Greeks and Romans) which means the philosophy of being (ontos = being, logos = treatise). It has evolved from the philosophy domain to be used within the computer science domain.

Just to entertain yourself ....

• The importance of being an O: ontology vs. Ontology (Guarino95) A classical definition you should know to be taken seriously in the ontology world: explicit specification of a conceptualization (Gruber93)
• An extension of Gruber's definition clarifying some aspects (Studer98)
• A rather old comprehensive introduction to ontologies (Uschold96)
• A further definition and the role of ontologies (Uschold99)
• Principles to design an ontology (clarity, coherence, extendability, etc) (Gruber93)

METHODOLOGIES

To develop an ontology is not easy (so I have been told!!) neither from scratch nor using an existing one. Wise people within the ontology domain have proposed some methodologies (aka steps to be followed). If we have not got a better idea, it is worthwhile using one as starting point ...

Some ideas for ontology's freshers:

• A guide to creating your first ontology (Noy01)
• A thorough sum up work on ontologies, methodologies and re-engineering (Fdez-lope02)
• A rather recent (2003, but two years is a long period in research!) and excellent review and comparison on ontology methodologies (Corcho03)
• One of my favourites: METHONTOLOGY (Gomez-perez98)

TOOLS

To help you out with building up an ontology, a myriad of projects and researchers have been developing generic and specific tools for ontology development, merge (take a couple of ontologies and let them share concepts!), annotation and querying.

It would be difficult to show all the available tools. There are some ongoing projects and developments, even so, check on the following:

• A good approach could be reading the following paper (sometimes too Semantic Web biased) (D13)

LANGUAGES

In the end, you will need some kind of ontology language to give structure to your ontology. Several languages have been developed and used throughout the past years. Some were mere research efforts whereas others have evolved (mainly thanks to being used in the Semantic Web).

You can research in more detail a particular language by tracking its references or homepage, however to start with, a good summary is given in (Corcho00)

Getting to the focus of my research, just some hints on what is available regarding agents, autonomous systems and conceptual modelling:

ONTOLOGY FOR AGENTS

There is plenty of available material on research regarding ontologies for agents (mainly within the Semantic Web or applied to information systems). The underlying idea is to have several agents interacting and communicating. To do so, they need to share some common concepts, language or ideas (so to say) usually regarded as an ontology.

Take a look at the following papers: (Colomb02, Colomb02b, Ferrario04).

And if one ontology was not enough, someone proposes a second and third level ontology ... (Sloman05)

ONTOLOGY FOR AUTONOMOUS SYSTEMS

Being the main topic of my research, I find it useful to look for any research on ontologies for autonomous systems. Some papers came up. However, what the rest of the world regards as an autonomous system does not fulfil my own view of the problem. Even so, it is worth it to consider others views...

• Autonomous systems as autonomous information system (Colomb02)
• Real time intelligent control (Evans02)
• More on autonomous systems (Wray04)

ONTOLOGY-BASED SOFTWARE

• Hope ontology-based software does not end as another buzz word. So far, it is trendy and looks great. Is it the track to follow?
• Make your mind up by reading (Stojanovic04, Almeida03,)

There are other several topics not considered in the aforementioned papers. Ontological commitments, Problem Solving Methods (PSM) (ontologies as knowledge modelling and psm as reasoning mechanisms), specific applications, ontologies and UML projects, etc.

A wide and challenging world is out there!!!