Overview

This first general textbook An introduction to ontology engineering has as main aim to provide the reader with a comprehensive introductory overview of ontology engineering. A secondary aim is to provide hands-on experience in ontology development that illustrate the theory.

The book is divided into three blocks: The end of each chapter contains review questions and exercises. Also, descriptions of two assignments are provided.

The textbook is principally aimed at advanced undergraduate/postgradute level in computer science and could fit a semester course in ontology engineering or a 2-week (very/perhaps too) intensive crash course. Domain experts and philosophers may find a subset of the chapters of interest, or work through the chapters in a different order.

2021 UCT Open Textbook Award for the OE textbook




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Also available in paperback, published by the non-profit College Publications. It is available from Amazon.com, .co.uk, .de, .es and many others
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Version 1    







Exercises and tutorials

The exercises are described in the book. It refers to several ontologies, other files, and tools specifically, which are listed here with links to the appropriate sources, in the order that you would come across it in the book.

The tutorials, assignments, and answers to the exercises for version 2 of the textbook are now available as a Workbook.

Supplementary materials for the textbook's exercises

Tools and plugins

Several in-house developed tools are used in the exercises:
  1. Logics support
  2. Methods for ontology authoring
    • TDDonto2 - authoring support in Protégé
    • CLaRO - competency question authoring
    • ONSET - foundational ontology selection
    • ROMULUS - foundational ontology repository
    • BFO Classifier - align an ontology to BFO v2.0
    • OntoPartS - select part-whole relations
    • TOMM - compute module metrics
    • NOMSA - modularise an ontology
  3. Natural language tools
For some pedagogical context about these tools, see:
Keet, C.M. In-house Developed Tools for Ontology Engineering Education (Demo). Proceedings of the Joint Ontology Workshops 2023 Episode IX: The Quebec Summer of Ontology --FOIS'23 Demonstrations. July 17-20, 2023, Sherbrooke, Canada. CEUR-WS Vol. 3637, paper 51.

Other tools and sites that are used or pass the revue in the exercises (to be completed):

Course Slides

The ones used in 2019 are available in pdf, latex source, and ppt (automated conversion + post-processing). However, note that some of the material lends itself well, or even better, for scribbling on the board rather than static pretty pictures on slides (especially in the FOL, DL and OWL sections). When I have more time, I may make more neat figures; the figures that I did not make are referenced in the tex source file or in the 'notes' section of the ppt file.
You can freely reuse and remix them, under a CC-BY licence.

Ontology Engineering Tutorials

Tutorials sessions, days, or weeks at various international events, with slides and practical activities:

Elsewhere

Version 1 of the book is also available in various institutional repositories, such as OpenUCT and the Open Textbook Archive, and people in charge of other archives and indexes have added it to other archives as well, including, but not limited to unglue.it (featured in the week of 13-8-2018), Open Libra, and the EBooks Directory. LibreText has been converting the textbook into HTML.
It was also posted on Reddit and I announced it on my blog.

The OE book or its predecessor lecture notes and/or the slides based on it [is being/was/has been/will be] used in whole or in part in the following courses/at the following universities (in alphabetical order): There's also a dialogue/interview with Teodora Petkova, following the publication of the textbook.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.