Ontological Engineering refers to the set of activities that concern the ontology development process, the ontology life cycle, the methods and methodologies for building ontologies, and the tool suites and languages that support them. During the last decade, increasing attention has been focused on ontologies and Ontological Engineering. Ontologies are now widely used in Knowledge Engineering, Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science; in applications related to knowledge management, natural language processing, e-commerce, intelligent integration information, information retrieval, integration of databases, b- informatics, and education; and in new emerging fields like the Semantic Web. Primary goals of this book are to acquaint students, researchers and developers of information systems with the basic concepts and major issues of Ontological Engineering, as well as to make ontologies more understandable to those computer science engineers that integrate ontologies into their information systems. We have paid special attention to the influence that ontologies have on the Semantic Web. Pointers to the Semantic Web appear in all the chapters, but specially in the chapter on ontology languages and tools.
