Reuso de ontologias: uma revisão de literatura no contexto da web semântica

Abstract

This article aims to present the results of a literature review on ontologies reuse. The concept of ontology has its genesis in Philosophy. However, many areas of human knowledge, such as library and information science and computer science, have adopted the concept of ontology. Ontologies have gained enormous prominence in these fields, making a great contribution in knowledge organization and modeling of realities. As a result of this focus on ontologies, several practical applications have arisen in areas such as Biomedicine, Law and Agriculture, with several ontology projects such as BFO (Basic Formal Ontology), GFO (General Formal Ontology), DOLCE (Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering), Blood Project, GO (The Gene Ontology), as well as controlled vocabularies such as AGROVOC, the GALEN (Generalized Architecture for Languages, Encyclopedias and Nomenclatures in Medicine) among others. The state of the art was conducted with the focus on the reuse of ontologies and inserted in the context of the semantic Web. The most relevant works produced in the recent years by the scientific community of the mentioned areas, was mapped. The research methodology is part of the qualitative approach and as methodological procedure we followed the literature search technique of published materials. The literature review was based on the thematic review. The following databases were highlighted: CAPES's Periodicals Portal, RCAAP (Open Access Scientific Repository of Portugal), Science Direct, Recherche Isidore, Scopus and Web of Science. Analyzes were carried out in peer-reviewed journals and within the recommended information retrospective for the Social Sciences area and in several languages (portuguese, english and french). As a result of the bibliographic research, a general overview was obtained on the reuse of ontologies, as well as the existing gaps and the theoretical and methodological contributions of each analyzed areas.