A2 - Ontological Engineering

Asunción Gómez Pérez

The aims of this tutorial are to present the theoretical foundations of the field of ontological engineering, methodologies and software environments for building ontologies, and the uses of ontologies in commercial and research applications.

The tutorial will provide answers to the following questions:

• What is an ontology?
• What principles should I follow to build an ontology?
• What types of ontologies already exist?
• How are ontologies organized in libraries?
• What are the relationships between ontologies and knowledge bases?
• What methodology/steps should I use to build my own ontology?
• Which techniques are appropriate for each step?
• How do software tools support the process of building and using ontologies?
• What are the most well-known ontologies? Can I use existing ontologies to build my ontology? What are the uses of ontologies in applications?

After the three hours tutorial, participants will be familiar with the theoretical foundations of this field, will be table to build ontologies and identify potential applications for this technology.

Prerequisite knowledge:
Participants need to have background knowledge on Knowledge Engineering and Artificial Intelligence.

Asunción Gómez Pérez is B.A. in Computer Science (1990), M.Sc. on Knowledge Engineering (1991), Ph.D. in Computer Sciences (1993) by Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain. She also is M.Sc. on Business Administration (1994) by Universidad Pontificia de Comillas, Spain. She has visited (1994-1995) the Knowledge Systems Laboratory at Stanford University. She is Associate Professor (1995- ) at the Computer Science School at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain. She also is the Executive Director (1995) of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the School. Her current research activities include, among others: Theoretical ontological foundations, Methodologies for building ontologies, Ontological Reengineering, Evaluation of ontologies, Uses of ontologies in applications, Knowledge Management on the web, etc. She has published more than 20 papers on the above issues. She has lead 5 projects funded by various institutions and/or companies. She is author of one book on Ontological Engineering and co-author of a book on Knowledge Engineering. She has been co-organizer of the workshops and conferences on ontologies at ECAI-98, SSS-97 and ECAI-96. She has taught tutorials on Ontological Engineering at ECAI-98, SEKE-97 and CAEPIA-97.

E-mail: asun@fi.upm.es
URL: http://www.dia.fi.upm.es/home_pages/asun.html