Special Issue: Developing and using engineering ontologies

摘要

Engineering today is overwhelmingly a collaborative activity, often widely geographically distributed, in which different participants bring specialist viewpoints to bear on their engineering tasks. In the process, the participants generate and use large quantities of information, often making use of sophisticated computer tools. Important challenges in this context are the sharing of information and the effective application and interoperability of the tools. A key technological approach in addressing these challenges is the use of ontologies. There are various notions of what these allow, but they are widely seen as involving the development and recording of conceptualizations of domains of shared interest. Ontologies allow sense to be made of a domain of interest through definition and classification of key entities, properties, relationships, and their dependencies. They allow richer knowledge models to be developed, they facilitate the communication through such models, and they enable knowledge-based technologies that depend on semantic access to be developed and applied.