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1.1: Aims and Synopsis

  • Page ID
    6394
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    The principal aim of this textbook is to provide the student with a comprehensive introductory overview of ontology engineering. A secondary aim is to provide hands-on experience in ontology development that illustrate the theory, such as language features, automated reasoning, and top-down and bottom-up ontology development with methods and methodologies.

    This textbook covers material such that, upon completion, the student:

    1. has a general understanding of the notion of what ontologies and knowledge bases are, what they can be used for, how, and when not;
    2. has obtained an understanding of the, currently, main ontology languages— OWL and its underlying Description Logics languages—in order to represent the knowledge in ontologies formally and to reason over them, and have a basic understanding of what an automated reasoner does;
    3. can confidently use an Ontology Development Environment;
    4. can confidently use methods and methodologies to develop ontologies, including the top-down approach with foundational ontologies and bottom-up using non-ontological resources such as relational databases, natural language or thesauri; and
    5. has become acquainted with several major applications and application scenarios, such as the Semantic Web Technologies for ontologies, and has had a taste of the research trends in the field.

    Interwoven in the aims is skills development for a 4th year/honours project or masters dissertation. The students will become familiar with reading scientific literature and will gain experience in report writing and presenting their work to their peers, in particular when carrying out the two suggested assignments.


    This page titled 1.1: Aims and Synopsis is shared under a CC BY 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Maria Keet via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform; a detailed edit history is available upon request.

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