A Generic Model of Ontology to Visualize Information Science Domain (OIS)

Abstract

Ontology has been a subject of many studies carried out in artificial intelligence (AI) and information system communities. Ontology has become an important component of the semantic web, covering a variety of knowledge domains. Although building domain ontologies still remains a big challenge with regard to its designing and implementation, there are still many areas that need to create ontologies. Information Science (IS) is one of these areas that need a unified ontology model to facilitate information access among the heterogeneous data resources and share a common understanding of the domain knowledge. The objective of this study is to develop a generic model of ontology that serves as a foundation of knowledge modelling for applications and aggregation with other ontologies to facilitate information exchanging between different systems. This model will be a metadata for a knowledge base system to be used in different purposes of interest, such as education applications to support educational needs for teachers and students and information system developers, and enhancing the index tool in libraries to facilitate access to information collections. The findings of the research revealed that overall feedback from the IS community has been positive and that the model met the ontology quality criteria. It was appropriate to provide consistency and clear understanding of the subject area. OIS ontology unifies information science, which is composed of library science, computer science and archival science, by creating the theoretical base useful for further practical systems. Developing ontology of information science (OIS) is not an easy task, due to the complex nature of the field. It needs to be integrated with other ontologies such as social science, cognitive science, philosophy, law management and mathematics, to provide a basic knowledge for the semantic web and also to leverage information retrieval.