Ontology Theory, Management and Design: An Overview and Future Directions

Abstract

Ontologies now play an important role in providing a commonly agreed understanding of a domain and in developing knowledge-based systems. They intend to capture the intrinsic conceptual and semantic structure of a specific domain. Many methodologies, tools and languages are already available to help anthologies’ designers and users. However, a number of questions remain open: what ontology development methodology provides the best guidance to model a given problem, what steps to be performed in order to develop an ontology? which techniques are appropriate for each step? how ontology’ lifecycle steps are upheld by the software tools? how to maintain an ontology and to evolve it in a consistent way? how to adapt an ontology to a given context? To provide answers to these questions, the authors review in this chapter the main methodologies, tools and languages for building, updating and representing ontologies that have been reported in literature.