Ontology engineering is the study of constructing knowledge representations in a domain and defining relationships between concepts. It provides a formal, explicit, and shared concept for reasoning about entities within a domain. Vocabulary definition is important, and ontology engineering involves developing ontologies for specific domains using interconnected activities, methodologies, tools, and languages. The goal is to make conceptualized knowledge explicit in software applications. Refined ontology engineering offers benefits such as borrowing from existing ontologies, saving time and resources, and transforming the knowledge industry.
In information science, ontology engineering is the study of methodologies used to construct knowledge representations within a specific domain and to elucidate the relationship between those concepts. An ontology serves two purposes: to describe a domain and to provide conceptualization for reasoning about entities within that domain. Therefore, an ontology is a formal, explicit and shared concept. Ontologies provide the structure framework for a variety of information organizations, applied in fields such as software engineering, life sciences, biomedical informatics, artificial intelligence, and information architecture. Ontology engineering is therefore often defined as a set of interconnected activities that develop the ontology for a specific domain.
Vocabulary definition is an important attribute of ontology engineering. Finding common terms, defining the level of formality for various terms, specifying their meaning and defining the relationship between terms and levels of formality are central to the process. Focusing on the development and improvement of this process, the ontology lifecycle, the methodologies used, and the tools and languages that support the process are considered interrelated tasks of ontology engineering. Due to the widespread use of ontologies in a wide range of domains, ontology engineering has become an important process marked by progressive refinement.
Also known as ontology construction, ontology engineering is thus a subfield of knowledge engineering and is best described as the study of methods used to construct ontologies. Making conceptualized knowledge explicit in software applications, within enterprises and business processes across a specific domain is therefore the goal of ontology engineering. The resolution of the semantic obstacles of inoperability is considered one of the vital directions of the field. One example is addressing the hurdles presented when naming business processes and assigning those processes to relevant software classes.
Distinct benefits are offered by deploying refined ontology engineering to build accurate ontologies. New ontologies can be built from existing components of already established ontologies. Multiple resources and applications can also share ontologies, providing opportunities. Biomedical science ontologies, for example, can borrow from life sciences and vice versa, thus saving time, money and resources. Building knowledge databases from scratch usually has the opposite impact.
As such, ontology engineering offers the potential to transform the knowledge industry. Rather than domains focusing on building knowledge databases from scratch when building new knowledge-based systems, they may instead borrow specialized terminology when dealing with related concepts. Thus, this allows systems engineers to shift focus to sharing and dissemination methodologies, while relegating the appropriate resources towards building more powerful hardware to host, access, and process these ontologies.
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