In this paper we present a methodology for ontology design and construction which incorporates the most outstanding design principles and a thorough evaluation process. An ontology provides logical formulation of complex problems of decision sciences like risk management, decision making under uncertainty, statistics and forecasting, negotiation and financial analysis. The main stages of this methodology are: requirements specification, formal design, construction, and evaluation. At each stage of the methodology a series of tasks are defined together with methods and techniques to build the ontology considering quality characteristics. Description logics is used as the formal language during design, a set of informal competency questions is used to support ontology conceptualization; at the evaluation stage, the set of questions are translated to a formal reasoning language and are used for evaluation purposes. Many methodologies and tools have been reported in literature, but little attention has been paid in the creation of consistent, modular, coherent, usable and reusable ontologies as an objective from the beginning of the design process. A comparative analysis with other methodologies is discussed and an Ontological Model for Medical Diagnosis is presented.

In this paper we address the problem of semantic heterogeneity among agents during the exchange of messages in negotiation process execution. Traditional negotiation systems impose several requirements on the type and format of negotiation messages, as a consequence negotiation agents have to be reprogrammed according to the protocol and message specifications. In contrast, we present a solution based on the development of a negotiation ontology, which incorporates a shared vocabulary of the terms and messages for negotiating; and a semantic disambiguation module, that is invoked when a lack of understanding among agents occurs. We designed and implemented a service oriented architecture for executing negotiations and conducted experiments incorporating different negotiation messages. The tests showed that the proposed ontology improves the execution of negotiation messages.

In this paper we describe an ontology model that was designed and implemented to represent academic and institutional contexts related with a research center in Mexico City. The ontology model aims at supporting logicbased query answering and reasoning regarding contexts such as geographical areas, time, persons, libraries, cultural and academic events, teaching and tutoring schedules. The type of questions that the ontology model is capable of answering range from academic issues such as tutoring and thesis supervision; those concerning the location of people, libraries, buildings, roads; those regarding time such as class schedules, event schedules; and even those about the food menu offered at the cafeteria of the institution. In order to evaluate the ontology model, a set of competency questions were translated into SQWRL rule-based query language. Results of queries show the feasibility of using ontological models as the supporting technology to implement ubiquitous and pervasive systems for academic environments.

Abstract-In this paper, we describe the process by which web services ontologies are populated from a web services collection. The general approach relies on a global ontology model that is used to represent automatically web services. The model is enriched with web service instances classified into a taxonomy. The main idea is to extract taxonomic relations (isTypeOf ) from web services using a supervised classifier of textual descriptions attached to web services. The entire process for ontology population involves the following tasks: text extraction from web service descriptions, classification of text descriptions and extraction of taxonomic relations (instances of classified web services). An experimentation was carried out with a collection of web service, which shows promising results and the feasibility of our approach.

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