Corporate Ontology Engineering
Ontologies build the central prerequisite for Corporate Semantic Search and Corporate Semantic Collaboration scenarios. Thus, in Corporate Ontology Engineering we research methodologies and tools for detecting and collecting expertise and for the administration and use of the resulting ontology models. Current approaches to these topics cover ontology development, storage, maintenance and evaluation. Accepted ontology languages are provided by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as RDF(S) and OWL which feature a XML-conform and Web-compatible fundament for networked, exchanged and reused ontologies in distributed environments.These technological foundations do not tackle the problems of ontology design, implementation and maintenance in corporate settings in a holistic manner. Context-sensitive facts and process-dependent aspects have to be modelled. Furthermore, the economic and collaborative dimensions of the process side are insufficiently researched, which play a major role in business contexts.
Ontology Modularization and Integration
Creation and maintenance of ontologies are cumbersome and time-consuming tasks. Therefore cost-effective methodologies and tools are essential for adopting ontologies in corporate settings. Modularization and Integration of ontologies allow to decrease the capital expenditure by enabling reusing relevant parts of already existing ontologies. The operational expenditure is also kept at a low level through an adequate partitioning of the corporate ontology. Modules of a suitable size are easier to maintain and allow more efficient usage. It is investigated how ontologies can be modularized and integrated in corporate settings and which information available in business environments are relevant.Ontology Versioning
The World Wide Web is large-scale, unregulated and heterogenous. Every individual is free in publishing, adapting and (re-)using information. These characteristics of the Web raise new problems with respect to ontology usage as ontologies can independently evolve, making it hard to keep user-generated data based on an evolving ontology consistent or to control the separate evolutions of the same ontology.We research a life-cycle management for ontologies which suits corporate settings with emphasize on control of user-specific and process-specific versions of ontologies including consistence checking, rollout and rollback of changes, individual adoption by users (automatic and on-demand) and matching of ontology versions. Our working group will focus on economic apects of ontology engineering processes as part of agile software engineering scenarios.