Development of an Ontology for an Industrial Domain

This chapter presents a method for ontology construction and its application in developing ontology in the domain of natural gas pipeline operations. Both the method as well as the application ontology developed, contribute to the infrastructure of Semantic Web that provides semantic foundation for supporting information processing by autonomous software agents. This chapter presents the processes of knowledge acquisition and ontology construction for developing a knowledge-based decision support system for monitoring and control of natural gas pipeline operations. Knowledge on the problem domain was acquired and analyzed using the Inferential Modeling Technique, then the analyzed knowledge was organized into an application ontology and represented in the Knowledge Modeling System. Since ontology is an explicit specification of a conceptualization that provides a comprehensive foundation specification of knowledge in a domain, it provides semantic clarifications for autonomous software agents that process information on the Internet.