Construção de Ontologias de Domínio a Partir de Mapas Conceituais

Abstract

Ontologies have been built and used in a variety of applications as a form of knowledge representation that is meant for software systems, or agents, as well as for human users. In relation to ontologies, conceptual maps are a more informal, simple and, thus, accessible form of knowledge representation. However, the freedom enjoyed in defining concepts and their links makes it dificult to directly draw formal representations from conceptual maps. This work presents a transcription process that is able to transform conceptual maps into ontologies specified in OWL (Web Ontology Language). In this way, the ease of construction of conceptual maps can be taken advantage of to alleviate the knowledge acquisition bottleneck that is inherent in ontology engineering. The translation process consists of two main stages: translation and merging. In the translation stage a group of conceptual maps about the same knowledge domain is transformed into a set of preliminary ontologies by mens of a translator module software. In the merging stage, ontology merging techniques are applied to the set of preliminary ontologies so as to yield a single unified ontology. This phase has been achieved by means of an available merging tool. Experiments for building conceptual maps have also been done and submited to the two phases of the translation process, in order to evaluate it.