Construindo ontologias a partir de recursos existentes: uma prova de conceito no domínio da educação.

Abstract

In ancient Greece, Aristotle (384-322 BCE) endeavored to collect all the existing science in his world to create the Encyclopedia. In the last decade, Berners-Lee and collaborators idealized the Web as a structured repository, observing an organization they called Semantic Web. Usually, domain knowledge is organized in ontologies. As a consequence, a great number of researchers are working on method and technique to build ontologies in Ontology Engineering. Ontology Learning meets automatic or semi-automatic processes which perform knowledge acquisition from existing resources. On the other hand, software engineering uses a collection of theories, methodologies and techniques to support information abstraction and several standards have been used, allowing interoperability and different tools promoted by the Object Management Group (OMG) – Model Driven Architecture (MDA), Meta Object Facility (MOF), Ontology Definition Metamodel (ODM) and XML Metadata Interchange (XMI). The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) released architecture in layers for implementing the Semantic Web with emphasis on the Web Ontology Language (OWL). A framework was developed to combine these concepts based on ODM, on OWL model, the correlation between metamodels, the requirements for the tools to participate; in it, the steps sequence was defined to be applied until initial representations of ontology were obtained. A proof of concept in the Education domain was developed to test this proposal.