INTRODUCTION
Ontological engineering[1] is a successor of knowledge engineering which has been
considered as a technology for building knowledge-intensive systems. Although
knowledge engineering has contributed to eliciting expertise, organizing it into a
computational structure, and building knowledge bases, AI researchers have noticed
the necessity of a more robust and theoretically sound engineering which enables
knowledge sharing/reuse and formulation of the problem solving process itself.
Knowledge engineering has thus developed into “ontological engineering” where
“ontology” is the key concept to investigate.
Although the necessity of an ontology and ontological engineering is wellunderstood,
there has been few success stories about ontology construction and its
deployment to date. This paper presents an activity of ontology construction and its
deployment in Oil-refinery plant which has been done under the umbrella of HumanMedia
Project for four years.
Human Media project, which is a MITI(Japanese Ministry of International Trade
and Industries) funded national project, is intended to invent an innovative media
technology for happier human life in the coming information society in 21st century. It
is something an integration of the three representative media such as Knowledge
media, Virtual media and Kansei media. “Kansei” is a Japanese term which roughly
means the sixth or seventh sense sensing for satisfaction, comfort, beauty, softness,
etc. Our ontology construction activities have been done in the project named