Construction of a Problem Solving Ontology : A Scheduling Task Ontology as an Example

Abstract

Recently much attention has been paid to the notion of "ontology" in the expectation that it can serve as the new, strong foundation of knowledge engineering. In the conventional approach to theory of knowledge, to give the operational semantics of knowledge representation has been regarded as of major importance and the analysis of contents of knowledge has been considered to be subordinate to it. To solidify the foundation of knowledge engineering, however, the many researchers, espcially in the field of knowledge sharing and reuse, has strongly felt necessity of the change of such a way of thinking. The key to the problem is to understand the essential interaction between "form" and "contents" on equal importance. This implies that deep understanding of "content" will give us new insight into design of knowledge representation. The notion of "ontology" can be key to this issue. We have investigated the property of problem solving knowledge and tried to design its ontology, that is, task ontology. The main purpose of this paper is to discuss the basic issues concerning the task ontology. It provides three major advantages as follows. (A) It provides human-friendly primitives in terms of which users can easily describe their own problem solving process. (B) The systems with task ontology can simulate the problem solving process at an abstract level in terms of conceptual level primitives. (C) It provides ontology author with an environment for building task ontology so that he/she can build a consistent and useful ontology.