Proposal of a Method to Assist The Ontological Study of Domains

Resumo

Resumo: Ontologies, since its formal definition in the 90’s up to its effective usage with the advent of methods and processes from the Ontology Engineering, have received important attention in projects that demand the formalization of shared knowledge among applications and users. In this context, it is important to popularize and to make people able to create and use them. This article presents a method to assist the ontology capture process, providing apparatus to conceptualize and identify the treated domain trough an ontological study. The proposed method provides metrics and guidelines so that an ontology engineer can identify and organize the elements of a domain, finding fundamental ontological relations among them. A descriptive algorithm is shown to formalize the wished process and some examples are given to better exemplify the utilization of the proposed method.

Abstract: Ontologies, since its formal definition in the 90’s up to its effective usage with the advent of methods and processes from the Ontology Engineering, have received important attention in projects that demand the formalization of shared knowledge among applications and users. In this context, it is important to popularize and to make people able to create and use them. This article presents a method to assist the ontology capture process, providing apparatus to conceptualize and identify the treated domain trough an ontological study. The proposed method provides metrics and guidelines so that an ontology engineer can identify and organize the elements of a domain, finding fundamental ontological relations among them. A descriptive algorithm is shown to formalize the wished process and some examples are given to better exemplify the utilization of the proposed method.