Effective Use of Ontologies

Abstract

An ontology provides a common view of a particular domain and can be seen as a conceptual schema that is supposed to be shared and understood by computers as well as humans. Nowadays, ontologies are used for solving problems in the fields of software design, knowledge representation, interoperability enhancement, web query improvement and semantic web among others, but mostly in the academic world. We can say that an ontology is used effectively for a program when it helps the program to behave more intelligently, improving some of its facets, such as providing more functionalities, improving the time response or increasing data compression.

The presented research studies how to use the ontologies effectively in real applications and therefore promote their use in real world. With this objective in mind the research has dealt with the methodologies and tools used to indentify relevant ontologies for a given task, the current state of the ontologies, and the effective application of ontologies to several fields in order to improve the functionalities of their Information Systems. This paper presents two experiences focused to understand how to use ontologies effectively to solve a given problem in the field of geographic information systems and how to create ontologies in order to improve their reusability. The first experience presents a method to create ontologies that nourish from the information from Internet. Second experience reuses a set of ontologies and specifications effectively in order to create a touristic virtual assistant for mobile devices with advanced functionalities. From these experiences some guidelines to improve the effectiveness in the creation, selection and reutilization of ontologies are presented.