Frequently Asked Questions
(for v1, v1.5, first and second edition)* Did this book come out of the blue?
No, there have been several versions of written lecture notes before, and then the first edition and an intermediate update.
It all started in 2009 with blog posts for the first installment of the Ontology Engineering module as part of the Semantic Web technologies course at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. They were then put together for the OE courses at the University of Havana and Meraka in 2010 (lingering around here) and they were gradually expanded upon over the years, updated with more recent material, and further written out in better writing in a number of iterations.
* Why is there no glossary?
Coming up with tweet-size definitions is far from trivial, and several terms can have more than one definition. You may also like to consult IAOA's Technical Committee on Education accessible term list with short definitions that I also contributed to once upon a time when I was co-chair of the committee.
* Why did you not mention my tool/method/specialisation?
I tried to aim for about 25 pages for each chapter in parts I and II and 11 chapters in total, so hard choices had to be made.
* Did you use ChatGPT or similar genAI tools?
No.
* Which tool did you use to create the images?
Omnigraffle.
* What software did you use to write the book?
TexShop; a local installation of a LaTeX program is much faster than online LaTeX editors. For the second edition, I modified the Legrand Orange template, which helped giving it a better textbook look-and-feel.
* What to do with the logic notations when you have a visual impairment?
It is possible to train the screen reader on it. It's been tried, tested, and used by one of my former PhD students (now research scientist at IBM), Dr. Joan Byamugisha. The instructions are described here.
* Would it not have been better with a 'proper publisher'?
Possibly. The version published by the non-profit College Publications publisher definitely looks neater than the free pdf from this site, and the second edition looks even better. Rigorous reviews might have helped improve clearer writing, yet the average level also has improved with experience.
There are several reasons why it wasn't published by one of the 'traditional' publishers. First and foremost, I think knowledge should be free, open, and shared. I also have benefited from material that has been made openly available, and I think it is fair to continue contributing to such sharing. Also, my previous employer paid me sufficient to live from and I don't think it would sell thousands of copies (needed for making a decent amount of money from a textbook), so setting up such a barrier of high costs for its use does not seem like a good idea. A minor consideration is that it would have taken much more time to publish, both due to the logistics and the additional reviewing (previous multi-author general textbook efforts led to nothing due to conflicting interests and lack of time, so I unlikely would ever satisfy all reviewers, if they would get around reading it), yet I needed the book for the next OE course installment. For the second edition, it was felt needed also because the book is in use at several universities and anything before COVID-19 seems old or dated.
* Are there enhancements in the pipeline?
At present: no. I had received a grant from the "Digital Open Textbooks for Develpment" (DOT4D) project to improve on the textbook and related teaching resources, which resulted in v1.5. The improvements were principally regarding the exercises, tutorials, Chapter 11 (co-authored with Zubeida Khan), more in Chapter 9, and several OE supporting tools and plugins. The second edition was released in 2025; see the brief overview of the changes. Text that used to be here in the previous version of this FAQ indicated a future version after the first edition, have been addressed for the most part and for those that haven't (usage and application-oriented), it smells of potential for a spin-off into a separate book.
* Will there be a free version 2.5 some time in the future?
Maybe. I did try to catch all syntactic and semantic typos, which were present in v1 in particular (see errata), but right after the release of a new edition, one does not immediately think of corrections and improvements (see also previous answer).
* This book is too difficult. Can you point me to a shorter and more gentle introduction?
Yes, I can. The What and How of Modelling Information and Knowledge book provides a good start in modelling and its chapter 5 provides an overview of ontologies and similar artefacts in a mere 30 pages.