Ontological Engineering refers to the set of activities that concern the ontology development process, the ontology life cycle, as well as the methodologies, tools and languages required for building ontologies.

Our goal is to provide the guidelines and technologies for more effective and efficient ontology network development, management, and use.

With the goal of speeding up the ontology development and improving the management of ontology development projects, our research is focused on identifying prescriptive methodological guidelines that help software engineers and ontology practitioners to build ontologies as well as on providing the necessary technological support.

Our effort is mainly devoted to the following processes and activities: ontology requirements specification; planning and scheduling; control; reuse and reengineering of non-ontological resources such as lexicons, thesauri, and classification schemes; reuse of general and domain ontologies; reuse of ontology design patterns, collaborative and argumentative ontology development; ontology modeling; ontology dynamics and evolution, multilingual mappings between ontologies, ontology localization, ontology summarization, and ontology evaluation and assessment.

Additionally, we are focused on enriching or grounding non-ontological models (e.g., qualitative models) and terms coming from folksonomies with ontological information. On the other hand, we are investigating agile methods for building lightweight terminologies to be used in the generation of linked data from a set of keywords.

Currently, we are applying our methods and techniques to build ontologies in the following domains and fields: e-government, geography, intellectual property rights, multimedia, and user context.

We are devoted to creating methodologies for building semantic applications, with special emphasis on methodologies for building applications that use linked data.

Projects

Currently we have the following projects in execution in this area:

• ADMIRE
• Autores 3.0
• BuscaMedia
• SemSorGrid4Env

In the past, for this research area, we have worked in the following projects:

• ICPS Ontology
• mIO!
• NeOn
• Geobuddies
• SEEMP
• Convenios colaboración IGN (2007, 2008)
• Servicios Semánticos
• Reimdoc

Main results

The work done so far in this research area has mainly been focused on providing (a) a general vision of the Ontology Engineering, (b) a methodology, called METHONTOLOGY, for building ontologies from scratch, and (c) the NeOn Methodology Framework for building ontology networks. The NeOn Methodology supports the collaborative aspects of ontology development and the reuse and the dynamic evolution of networked ontologies in distributed environments. It is also a scenario-based methodology that includes methodological guidelines and proposes methods, techniques and tools for carrying out processes and activities, defined in the NeOn Glossary of Processes and Activities.

The following ontologies have been developed by members of the OEG:

• FP Research project ontologies
• LIR ontology
• OMV (Ontology Metadata Vocabulary)
• Meta-scheduler ontologies
• GeoBuddies ontology network
• mIO! ontology network

Some of the most relevant publications in this area are:

• Suárez-Figueroa, M.C.; Gómez-Pérez, A.; Motta, E.; Gangemi, A. (Eds.) Ontology Engineering in a Networked World.  2012 Springer.
• Ontological Engineering. Gómez-Pérez, A.; Fernández-López, M.; Corcho, O. Springer-Verlag. November 2003.
• A. Gómez-Pérez, M.C. Suárez-Figueroa, M. Vigo. gOntt: a Tool for Scheduling Ontology Development Projects. Demo paper in Proceedings of the 8th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2009).
• M.C. Suárez-Figueroa, A. Gómez-Pérez, Boris Villazón-Terrazas. How to write and use the Ontology Requirements Specification Document. Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Ontologies, DataBases, and Applications of Semantics (ODBASE 2009). On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems: OTM 2009. (Robert Meersman, Tharam Dillon, and Pilar Herrero). ISBN: 978-3-642-05150-0. LNCS 5871. Volume: Part II. Pages: 966-982.
• M.C. Suárez-Figueroa, A. Gómez-Pérez. NeOn Methodology for Building Ontology Networks: a Scenario-based Methodology. Proceedings of the International Conference on SOFTWARE, SERVICES & SEMANTIC TECHNOLOGIES (S3T 2009). ISBN: 978-954-9526-62-2. Pages: 160-167.
• M. Espinoza, A. Gómez-Pérez, E. Montiel-Ponsoda. Multilingual and Localization Support for Ontologies. The Semantic Web: Research and Applications, 6th European  Semantic Web Conference, ESWC 2009, Heraklion, Crete, Greece, May 31-June 4, 2009.
• A. García-Silva, A. Gómez-Pérez, M.C. Suárez-Figueroa, B. Villazón-Terrazas. A Pattern Based Approach for Re-engineering Non-Ontological Resources into Ontologies. The Semantic Web, 3rd Asian Semantic Web Conference, ASWC 2008, Bangkok, Thailand, December 8-11, 2008.
• M. C. Suárez-Figueroa, A. Gómez-Pérez. Towards a Glossary of Activities in the Ontology Engineering Field. Proceedings of the Sixth International Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08). Marrakech, Morocco. May 2008.
• M. Fernández-López, A. Gómez-Pérez, M.C. Suárez-Figueroa. Selecting and Customizing a Mereology Ontology for its Reuse in a Pharmaceutical Product Ontology. Formal Ontology in Information Systems, Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference, FOIS 2008, Saarbrücken, Germany, October 31st - November 3rd, 2008.
• A. Gómez-Pérez. Ontology Evaluation. Handbook on Ontologies. 2004. International Handbooks on Information Systems. Springer.
• M. Fernández-López, A. Gómez-Pérez. Searching for a Time Ontology for Semantic Web Applications. In: Varzi A, Vieu L (eds) Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS 2004), Torino, Italy IOS Press, Amsterdam.
• M. Fernández-López, A. Gómez-Pérez, N. Juristo. METHONTOLOGY: from Ontological Art towards Ontological Engineering. Proceedings of the AAAI97 Spring Symposium.

There are also some software downloads, gOntt, LabelTranslator, ODEMapster, vocab-express, availables at the software section.

Participants

This research area is led by Asunción Gómez-Pérez, and the team behind in formed by Mari Carmen Suárez-Figueroa, Mariano Fernández-López, Jorge Gracia, the PhD students Esther Lozano and María Poveda.

Job opportunities

There are currently no job offers or studentships available in this research area. For offers in other areas of the group, please check in our job opportunities section.

However, you may contact Asunción Gómez-Pérez to check whether there are any potential open positions in the near future.