Ontology Engineering for Management of Data in the Transportation Domain

摘要

This report discusses work done as a collaboration between the Kansas Department of Transportation, the University of Kansas Civil Engineering Department, and the Dakota State University School of Business and Information Systems. The work was an examination of the technologies, potential applications, and appropriate processes for applying semantic information in the service of knowledge management in the transportation domain. In particular, this research group examined taxonomies and ontologies, along with supporting technological infrastructure which have been or could be applied to matters related to DOT knowledge management. Since ontologies provide an overarching framework for expressing and embedding information, sufficient ontological foundations are essential. Since the entirety of transportation knowledge exceeded the scope of this project, two aspects were pursued--a broad, shallow portion ontology which would provide a context for other work, along with a narrow, deep ontology which would support examining knowledge representation issues in more detail. During the project, the importance of re-using ontologies became apparent, along with the value of combining multiple ontologies to cover a domain. This was particularly true of the broader (upper level) ontologies and of those which are more generally applicable (e.g. ontologies for time, location, or documents). In examining a narrow, deep ontology, focused on a transportation topic, this research focused on bridges.