Chapter 7 - Ontology Engineering

We have focussed mainly on the techniques that are essential to the Semantic Web: representation languages, query languages, transformation and inference techniques, tools. Clearly, the introduction of such a large volume of new tools and techniques also raises methodological questions: how to best apply all these tools and these techniques? Which languages and tools to use in which circumstances, and in which order? How to deal with issues of quality control, resource management, etc.

Many of these questions for the Semantic Web have been studied in other contexts, for example in Software Engineering, object-oriented design, and Knowledge Engineering. It would be much beyond the scope of this book to give a comprehensive treatment of all of these issues. Nevertheless, in this chapter we will give brief treatment of some of themethodological issues that arise when building ontologies. In particular, we will discuss the following:

• manually constructing ontologies
• re-using existing ontologies
• using semi-automatic methods