Ontologies and Conceptual Models in Industrial Enterprises and Software Development Processes

MARCELA VEGETTI; HORACIO LEONE; GABRIELA HENNING; SILVIO GONNET

Gramado

Congreso; Iberoamercian Meeting on Ontological Research; 2011

UFES-UNIRIO-UFRGS

This work presents the main objective and the research statement the ?Ontologies and Conceptual Models in Industrial Enterprises and Software Development Processes? research Group. We completely agree with the view of domain ontologies as explicit and formal models of specific knowledge fields, which satisfy the requirement of reflecting the consensus of a community. The reasons why the group has been involved in the development of conceptual models and domain ontologies in the past 20 years are the following: (i) They play an essential role in describing and understanding complex fields; (ii) As a shared notation and a conceptual foundation, they facilitate the communication, discussion, exchange of case studies, etc., among the members of a community; (iii) Since knowledge is explicitly and formally expressed, conceptual models and ontologies support inference processes and, therefore, the development of intelligent systems; (iv) By providing a declarative, machine readable representation, ontologies can enable unambiguous communication  between software agents that would otherwise be difficult or impossible. In this way, ontologies play a central role in solving nowadays problems associated with islands of automation by providing a semantic integration foundation to the enterprise applications integration field.