Preface to MOST-ONISW 2009

Ontology is a cross-disciplinary field concerned with the study of concepts and theories that can be used for representing shared conceptualizations of specific domains. Ontological Engineering is a discipline in computer and information science concerned with the development of techniques, methods, languages and tools for the systematic construction of concrete artifacts capturing these representations, i.e., models (e.g., domain ontologies) and metamodels (e.g., upper-level ontologies). In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the application of formal ontology and ontological engineering to solve modeling problems in diverse areas in computer science such as software and data engineering, knowledge representation, natural language processing, information science, among many others.

Authors and Affiliations

1. Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas (FORTH),  

   Martin Doerr

2. Federal University of Pernambuco, Recife, Brazil

   Fred Freitas

3. Federal University of Espírito Santo, Vitória, Brazil

   Giancarlo Guizzardi

4. LeMoyne College, USA

   Hyoil Han

Editors and Affiliations

1. Instituto de Informática, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil

   Carlos Alberto Heuser

2. Department of Management Information Systems, University of Regensburg, Universitätsstraße 31, 93053, Regensburg, Germany

   Günther Pernul

Reprints and permissions

© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

Policies and ethics