Abstract
Capturing knowledge has always been an objective although known to be costly and time consuming. Ontologies, being “an explicit specification of a conceptualization”, have tried to capture knowledge through concepts that, in some cases, are used to represent a domain entity, relations between the domain concepts, functions, axioms and instances.
This paper describes an ontology for the Portuguese Air Force Headquarters (Estado Maior da Força Aérea - EMFA), reporting also on the ontology building process, its life cycle, applied methodologies, decisions taken and results achieved.
The sources of information, used in the knowledge acquisition phase, consisted mainly of the EMFA organization book, the Internet, and text analysis techniques, as well as interviews, brainstorming and cross-validation sessions. Conceptualization consisted on the identification of concepts and classes while building classification trees. The resulting EMFA ontology comprehends six main modules covering the key concepts of the military organization domain. All modules were cross-validated in several meetings and informal competency questions were used in order to verify the usefulness of the ontology.
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Páscoa, C., Pinto, H.S., Tribolet, J. (2011). Ontology Construction: Portuguese Air Force Headquarters Domain. In: Harmsen, F., Grahlmann, K., Proper, E. (eds) Practice-Driven Research on Enterprise Transformation. PRET 2011. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 89. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-23388-3_4
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