Designing and Building Business Ontologies

An ontology is a formal description of the meaning of the information stored in a system. It resembles a conceptual model, but goes much beyond a conceptual model in that the formal definitions allow the system to infer class membership based on properties. Additionally, inference engines, running on ontologies, allow users to extract and integrate information stored in distributed systems.

This workshop, which will contain a number of live demos, will cover practical issues in employing ontologies.

Participants will:

• Gain an understanding of what an ontology is and what it can be used for.
• Understand how representing information in an ontology goes beyond a conceptual model or a simple taxonomy.
• Understand the difference between frame based/ declarative classes and description logic based/ derivable classes.
• Understand the difference between open world and closed world models.
• Understand the basic principles for designing Ontologies for corporate applications.