REVERSE ENGINEERING A DOMAIN ONTOLOGY TO UNCOVER FUNDAMENTAL ONTOLOGICAL DISTINCTIONS - An Industrial Case Study in the Domain of Oil and Gas Production and Exploration

Mauro Lopes, Giancarlo Guizzardi, Fernanda Araujo Baião, Ricardo Falbo

2009

Abstract

Ontologies are commonly used in computer science either as a reference model to support semantic interoperability in several scenarios, or as a computer-tractable artifact that should be efficiently represented to be processed. This duality poses a tradeoff between expressivity and computational tractability that should be taken care of in different phases of an ontology engineering process. In this scenario, the choice of the ontology representation language is crucial, since different languages contain different expressivity and ontological commitments, reflecting on the specific set of available constructs. The inadequate use of a representation language, disregarding the goal of each ontology engineering phase, can lead to serious problems to database design and integration, to domain and systems requirements analysis within the software development processes, to knowledge representation and automated reasoning, and so on. This article presents an illustration of these issues by using a fragment of an industrial case study in the domain of Oil and Gas Exploration and Production. We make explicit the differences between two different representations of this domain, and highlight a number of concepts and ideas (tacit domain knowledge) that were implicit in the original model represented using a lightweight ontology language and that became explicit by applying methodological directives underlying an ontologically well-founded modeling language.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Lopes M., Guizzardi G., Araujo Baião F. and Falbo R. (2009). REVERSE ENGINEERING A DOMAIN ONTOLOGY TO UNCOVER FUNDAMENTAL ONTOLOGICAL DISTINCTIONS - An Industrial Case Study in the Domain of Oil and Gas Production and Exploration . In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 3: ICEIS, ISBN 978-989-8111-86-9, pages 262-267. DOI: 10.5220/0002014902620267

in Bibtex Style

@conference{iceis09,
author={Mauro Lopes and Giancarlo Guizzardi and Fernanda Araujo Baião and Ricardo Falbo},
title={REVERSE ENGINEERING A DOMAIN ONTOLOGY TO UNCOVER FUNDAMENTAL ONTOLOGICAL DISTINCTIONS - An Industrial Case Study in the Domain of Oil and Gas Production and Exploration},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 3: ICEIS,},
year={2009},
pages={262-267},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0002014902620267},
isbn={978-989-8111-86-9},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 3: ICEIS,
TI - REVERSE ENGINEERING A DOMAIN ONTOLOGY TO UNCOVER FUNDAMENTAL ONTOLOGICAL DISTINCTIONS - An Industrial Case Study in the Domain of Oil and Gas Production and Exploration
SN - 978-989-8111-86-9
AU - Lopes M.
AU - Guizzardi G.
AU - Araujo Baião F.
AU - Falbo R.
PY - 2009
SP - 262
EP - 267
DO - 10.5220/0002014902620267