Design Methodology for Integrated Systems - Part I (Ontology Design)

Introduction

Ontologies are high expressive knowledge models and as such increase the expressiveness and intelligence of a system. Ontologies were introduced into the computer and information community to be used by various agents and for different applications addressing the problems of various knowledge domains.

There is not a single widely accepted ontology design methodology. We discussed some of the currently available methodologies in Chapter 5. We propose an Onto-Agent Methodology as the first methodology that unifies the different approaches of the existing ontology and multi-agent systems design methodologies. The five steps of the first part of the Onto-Agent Methodology (Onto Methodology) are described in this chapter and are accompanied by some illustrative examples. The second part of the Onto-Agent Methodology (Agent Methodology) also consists of five steps which are described with illustrative examples in the next chapter.