Abstract:
Ontology Engineering is a new development methodology for building ontologies. Ontologies are widely used to overcome the problem of interoperability between integrated information systems. Ontology in general is an agreed understanding of a certain domain. It can enable semantic interoperability where autonomous and distributed applications can meaningfully communicate to exchange data and interoperate independently of their internal technologies. Ontologies contain perdurant entities (entities that happen in time) as well as endurants (entities that exist in time). First, the study investigates the definition of ontology as a specification of a conceptualization by showing that an ontology supporting interoperating information systems can be seen as the result of interlocking institutional worlds (IWs). IWs are collections of interlocked organizations interact together and exchange information to achieve partake tasks. Second, it specifies a software system, an ontology server needed to support domain ontology of IWs at run-time and design-time for ontology engineering.
The main goal of this thesis is twofold. First (general sense), it presents a specification for ontology engineering to guide ontology designers towards building ontology supporting interoperation of information system using a standard modeling approach. Second (specific sense), it presents a specification of an ontology server to serve as a mechanism for binding information systems together in specific domain and support them with agreed semantics.
The principal contribution of this work is the technical solution for ontology of perdurants representation. Based on speech act theory, and institutional fact, we present a technique for representing ontology of perdurants with a mechanism for managing instances of them. The proposed the technical solution (POUP profile) and the ontology server frameworks was applied in some examples of IWs and the results show that the combination of POUP with the ontology server provides a promise tool for enhancing semantic interoperability between IWs participants and hence, it mitigates semantic heterogeneity in IWs.
