Ontologies and Ontology Engineering
An ontology is, in this setting, a set of human and computer readable statements describing a vocabulary within a domain. The statements use a predefined meta-language with a predefined semantics, allowing both humans and computers to dervide meaning from the statements in an ontology. Typically, an ontology describes terms and relationships used in one or more datasets, thus providing a semantics or added meaning to the data within the data.
Ontology engineering is the set of tasks aimed at constructing and maintaining ontologies.
The most common languages for expressing ontologies are OWL and RDFS.
Ontologies can be used for:
- saturation (i.e. derive implicit facts)
- integration under a common vocabulary
- communication of knowledge
- checking consistency of a dataset
- making knowledge independent or separate from code of computer programs
Guides and Tutorials
- Wikipedia’s page on Ontologies
- Wikipedia’s page on Ontology Engineering
- A data engineer’s guide to semantic modelleing
- IN3060
– Semantic Technologies Lectures
- In particular: “OWL Basics”, “More OWL”, “OWL Loose Ends” and “OTTR Templates”