Ph.D. Dissertation Proposal Defense Towards a Methodology for Modular Ontology Engineering with Patterns By Cogan Shimizu

Ph.D. Committee:  Drs. Pascal Hitzler (advisor), Michelle Cheatham, Michael Raymer, and Karl Hammer (Jonkoping University, Sweden)

ABSTRACT:

Published ontologies frequently fall short of their promises to enable knowledge sharing and reuse. This may be due to too strong or too weak ontological commitments; one way to prevent this is to engineer the ontology to be modular, thus allowing users to more easily adapt ontologies to their own individual use-cases. In order to enable this engineering paradigm, there is a distinct need for developing a robust methodology and supporting tooling infrastructure. This increased support can be immediately impactful in a number of ways: guides engineers through best practices and promote ontology design pattern discovery, sharing, and reuse. This proposal outlines an approach for developing an appropriate modular ontology engineering methodology and supporting tooling infrastructure, their evaluation, and the projected timeline to accomplish these tasks.