Incollection,
Ontology-Oriented Design and Programming
Knowledge Engineering and Agent Technology, IOS Press, Amsterdam, (2000)
Abstract
In the construction of both conventional software and intelligent
systems, developers continue to seek higher level abstractions that
both can aid in conceptual modeling and can assist in implementation
and maintenance. In recent years, the artificial intelligence community
has placed considerable attention on the notion of explicit ontologies?
shared conceptualizations of application areas that define the salient
concepts and relationships among concepts. Such ontologies, when
joined with well defined problem-solving methods, provide convenient
formalisms for modeling and for implementing solutions to application
tasks. This chapter reviews the motivation for seeking such high-level
abstractions, and summarizes recent successes in building systems
from reusable domain ontologies and problem-solving methods. As
the environment for software execution moves from individual workstations
to the Internet at large, casting new software applications in terms
of these high-level abstractions may make complex systems both easier
to build and easier to maintain.
