Ontologies provide a common vocabulary of an area and define, with different levels of formality, the meaning of the terms and the relationships between them. Ontological Engineering refers to the set of activities that concern the ontology development process, the ontology life cycle, the methods and methodologies for building ontologies, and the tool suites and languages that support them. During the last decade, increasing attention has been focused on ontologies. Ontologies are now widely used in Knowledge Engineering, Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science; in applications related to areas such as Knowledge Management, Natural Language Processing, e-Commerce, Intelligent Information Integration, Bio-Informatics, Education; and in new emerging fields like the Semantic Web. The book presents the major issues of Ontological Engineering and describes the most outstanding ontologies that are currently available. It covers the practical aspects of selecting and applying methodologies, languages, and tools for building ontologies. Ontological Engineering will be of great value to students and researchers, and to developers who want to integrate ontologies in their information systems.

Ontologies provide a common vocabulary of an area and define - with different levels of formality - the meaning of the terms and relations between them. With the growth of information available, e.g. on the WWW, they are popularly applied in knowledge management, natural language generation, enterprise modelling, knowledge-based systems, ontology-based brokers, e-commerce platforms and interoperability between systems. Ontological Engineering is a comprehensive survey of ontologies with practical guidance on selection and applications in knowledge management and e-commerce. This book looks at questions such as:

• What is an ontology?
• What are the uses of ontologies?/li>
• What types of ontologies exist?
• What are the most well-known ones?
• How do I select the best ontology for my application?
• What are the principles for building an ontology?
• What methodologies should I use to build my own ontology?
• Which techniques are appropriate for each step?/li>
• How do software tools support the process of building and using ontologies? What language can I use to implement ontologies?
• How can I integrate ontologies in a given language?