a state of the art

The aim of this paper is to review the most important research initiatives concerning context in computer science. Context aspects are a key issue for many research communities like artificial intelligence, real time systems or mobile computing, because it relates information processing and communication to aspects of the situations in which such processing occurs. The overview addresses the ways context is defined and understood in various computer science fields and tries to estimate the role of context in the novel scenario of the Semantic Web, by studying the particularities of this setting, compared to the Artificial Intelligence or Natural Language Processing ones, and the consequences of these particularities in resolving the key questions concerning contextual aspects

Ontology Engineering Cost Estimation with ONTOCOM

Techniques for reliably estimating development efforts are a fundamental requirement for a wide-scale dissemination of ontologies in business contexts. In this report we account for the similarities and differences between software and ontology engineering in order to establish the appropriateness of applying software cost models to ontologies. We present a parametric approach to cost estimation for ontology development – ONTOCOM – and analyze various cost factors implied in the ontology engineering process

Applying ONTOCOM to DILIGENT

Ontology Engineering is currently advancing from a pure research topic to real applications. This state of the art is emphasized by the wide range of European projects with major industry involvement and, in the same time, by the evergrowing interest of small and medium size enterprizes asking for consultancy in this domain. A core requirement in all of these efforts is, however, the availability of proved and tested methods which allow an efficient engineering of high-quality ontologies, be that by reuse, new building or automatic extraction methods. Several elaborated methodologies, which aid the development of ontologies for particular application requirements, emerged in the last decades. Nevertheless, in order for ontologies to be built and deployed at a large scale, beyond the boundaries of the academic community, one needs not only technologies and tools to assist the engineering process, but also means to estimate and control its overall costs. These issues are addressed only marginally by current engineering approaches though their importance is well recognized in the community. Different approaches exist to estimate costs for engineering processes. We will present the parametric cost estimation model ONTOCOM and its alignment with the DILIGENT engineering methodology. Based on the resulting cost function some analytical evaluations of application scenarios for the DILIGENT model are provided

Reasoning paradigms for OWL ontologies

Representing knowledge in OWL provides two important limitations; on one hand efficient reasoning on real-world ontologies containing a large set of individuals is still a challenging task. On the other hand though OWL offers a reasonable trade-off between expressibility and decidability, it can not be used efficiently to model certain application domains. In this paper we give an overview of some of the most relevant approaches in this domain and present OWL2Jess, which is a comprehensive converter tool enabling Jess reasoning over OWL ontologies

A cost model for ontology engineering

In this report we propose a methodology for cost estimation for ontologies and analyze cost factors implied in the engineering process. We examine the appropriateness of a COCOMO-like parametric approach to ontology cost estimation and propose a non-calibrated ontology cost model, which is to be continuously refined along with the collection of empiric data on person month efforts invested in developing ontologies in real-world projects. We further describe the human-driven evaluation of the cost drivers described in the parametric model on the basis of the cost models’ quality framework by Boehm[5