My first textbook “An Introduction to Ontology Engineering” (pdf) is just released as an open textbook. I have revised, updated, and extended my earlier lecture notes on ontology engineering, amounting to about 1/3 more new content cf. its predecessor. Its main aim is to provide an introductory overview of ontology engineering and its secondary aim is to provide hands-on experience in ontology development that illustrate the theory.
The contents and narrative is aimed at advanced undergraduate and postgraduate level in computing (e.g., as a semester-long course), and the book is structured accordingly. After an introductory chapter, there are three blocks:
- Logic foundations for ontologies: languages (FOL, DLs, OWL species) and automated reasoning (principles and the basics of tableau);
- Developing good ontologies with methods and methodologies, the top-down approach with foundational ontologies, and the bottom-up approach to extract as much useful content as possible from legacy material;
- Advanced topics that has a selection of sub-topics: Ontology-Based Data Access, interactions between ontologies and natural languages, and advanced modelling with additional language features (fuzzy and temporal).
Each chapter has several review questions and exercises to explore one or more aspects of the theory, as well as descriptions of two assignments that require using several sub-topics at once. More information is available on the textbook’s page [also here] (including the links to the ontologies used in the exercises), or you can click here for the pdf (7MB).
Feedback is welcome, of course. Also, if you happen to use it in whole or in part for your course, I’d be grateful if you would let me know. Finally, if this textbook will be used half (or even a quarter) as much as the 2009/2010 blogposts have been visited (around 10K unique visitors since posting them), that would mean there are a lot of people learning about ontology engineering and then I’ll have achieved more than I hoped for.
UPDATE: meanwhile, it has been added to several open (text)book repositories, such as OpenUCT and the Open Textbook Archive, and it has been featured on unglue.it in the week of 13-8 (out of its 14K free ebooks).
Keet blog 