The Research On Theory And Application Of Ontology

Nowadays, the technology of information processing which computer is used as tools went through numerical calculation stage, numerical processing stage, coming into the knowledge processing stage. Knowledge Engineering is now a key technology in the upcoming knowledge society and has become a major technique for information integration. At the same time, Knowledge Engineering meets with two obstacles: how to achieve knowledge sharing and knowledge reuse.Ontology is an advanced technology of knowledge representation in AI. It uses concepts and relations between concepts to describe abstract facts and build models. In recent years, the term "ontology" has gained a good popularity within the knowledge engineering community. An important reason for this is that present tremendous need towards knowledge sharing and knowledge exchange. In the knowledge engineering community, researchers widespread consider that the ontology theories research and architecture building is the important basis of realizing these targets, because any knowledge-based systems is based on a certain conceptualization of the world and the ontology is a kind of specification of the conceptualization. An ontology defines the basic concepts and relation, which scope is a domain or much wider. This makes these concepts and relations have explicit and exclusive definitions in certain scope. Then people can communicate with machines.The main research of this thesis is as follows:(1) Building domain ontology: Although building ontologies is a very important issue, at present, there is no any mature methodology to guide the development of ontologies. The development of ontologies should be an engineering process the same as software development. However, compared with traditional software development, building ontologies emphasizes evolvement, share and reuse. So it has more engineering characteristics. In the paper, the process of developing ontology is also explained through an example.(2) Database conceptual modeling based ontology: In the research of ontology application, we analyze the relationship between ontology and E-R Model, and the action of ontology in database conceptual modeling design. This paper inquires into the basic method that ontology is used in database conceptual modeling design.