Knowledge Engineering Methodology

Knowledge Engineering Methodology#

Engineering Workflow#

Step 1. Determine the Domain and Scope of the Ontology#

Main idea: We define our domain - Conceptualization and then we determine our scope - Competency Questions.

Conceptualization#

In orther to determine the domain that the ontology will cover, we answer some questions:

Why do you want a semantic model/ontology?
For what are we going to use the ontology?
- What is your Use Case? The best solution to model a domain depends on the application that you have in mind and the extensions anticipated.
Who will use and maintain the ontology?

Competency Questions (CQ)#

In order to determine the scope we can sketch a list of questions that a knowledge base based on the ontology should answer. To kick off the CQ sketch, we can start answering:

For what types of questions should the information in the ontology provide answers?
Do the answers require a particular level of detail or representation of a particular area?
Does this area/domain contain enough information to answer these types of questions or we need to link more than one area?

Step 2. Ontology Development#

Main idea: Iterative design — Ontology development is an iterative process.

2.1 - Reusing Existing Ontologies#

If we can, we always consider first refine and extend existing sources for our domain and tasks.

2.2 - Enumerate Important Terms in the Ontology#

Create a list of all terms, weather they are clasified as concepts, relationships/properties; we do not classify them yet. Some questions can help us lisitng the key terms:

What are the concepts/terms/information we want to talk about?
What would we like to say about those terms/concepts?
What characterisitcs do those terms have?

2.3 - Define Classes, Class Hierarchy and Properties#

Main idea: First, we create few definitions of the concepts/terms/information from the previous list. From that we can start building a hierarchy with classes classifying them into parents and child terms. And then, once we have built a hierarchy we describe properties of these classes.

—-(WIP)—– #ToDo: - Finish check OBOAcademy for documentation about it - Finish adding info from ref1