Ontology Engineering: a Survey and a Return on Experience

Ontology is a new object of IA that recently came to maturity and a powerful conceptual tool of Knowledge Modeling. It provides a coherent base to build on, and a shared reference to align with, in the form of a consensual conceptual vocabulary, on which one can build descriptions and communication acts. This report presents the object that is called "an ontology" and a state of the art of engineering techniques for ontologies. Then it describes a project for which we developed an ontology and used it to improve knowledge management. Finally it describes the design process and discuss the resulting ontology