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Ontology engineering for management of data in the transportation domain.
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2008-11-01
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[PDF-1.58 MB]
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Edition:Final report
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Abstract:This report discusses work done as a collaboration between the Kansas Department of Transportation, the University of Kansas Civil Engineering Department, and the Dakota State University School of Business and Information Systems. The work was an examination of the technologies, potential applications, and appropriate processes for applying semantic information in the service of knowledge management in the transportation domain. In particular, this research group examined taxonomies and ontologies, along with supporting technological infrastructure which have been or could be applied to matters related to DOT knowledge management. Since ontologies provide an overarching framework for expressing and embedding information, sufficient ontological foundations are essential. Since the entirety of transportation knowledge exceeded the scope of this project, two aspects were pursued: a broad, shallow portion ontology which would provide a context for other work, along with a narrow, deep ontology which would support examining knowledge representation issues in more detail. During the project, the importance of re-using ontologies became apparent, along with the value of combining multiple ontologies to cover a domain. This was particularly true of the broader (upper level) ontologies and of those which are more generally applicable (e.g. ontologies for time, location, or documents). In examining a narrow, deep ontology, focused on a transportation topic, this research focused on bridges. First, the authors worked to identify the information structures necessary to describe bridges, in sufficient detail to represent those facets of most interest to DOTs. A key aspect of such work is determining a sufficiently fine representation. Since a key aspect of DOTs’ operations involve interacting with transportation resources throughout their life-cycle, our group then developed an ontological model for the information involved in the long-term management and maintenance of bridges. In the course of this work, the authors adapted methodologies borrowed from software engineering to apply to ontology development. The key results of this work are identifying the proximity of semantic tools such as ontologies to practical applications in the transportation domain, the importance of combining and re-using ontologies (along with the identification of a variety of such resources applicable for DOTs), and the value of developing and applying engineering processes to manage the development of ontologies.
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