Smart Mobility Ontology: Current Trends and Future Directions

Ontology, as a discipline of philosophy, explains the nature of existence and has its roots in Aristotle and Plato studies on "metaphysics" (Welty and Guarino, 2001). However, the word ontology originated from two Greek words: ontos (being) and logos (word), and conceived for the first time during the Sixteen century by German philosophers (Welty and Guarino, 2001). From then till the mid-twentieth, ontology evolved mainly as a branch of philosophy. However, with the advent of Artificial Intelligence since the 1950s, researchers perceived the necessity of ontology to describe a new world of intelligent systems (Welty and Guarino, 2001). Moreover, with the development of the World Wide Web in the 1990s, ontology development got to be common among different domain specialists to define and share the concepts and entities in their fields on the Internet (Noy et al., 2001). During the last three decades, ontology development studies have evolved and shifted from theoretical issues of ontology to practical implications of the use of ontology in real-world, large-scale applications (Noy et al., 2001). Nowadays, ontology development focuses mainly on defining machine interpretable concepts and their relationships in a domain. However, ontology development also pursues other goals, such as providing a common conceptualization of the domain on which different experts agree, (Métral and Cutting-Decelle, 2011) and enable them to reuse the domain knowledge (Noy et al., 2001). It also enables researchers to easily analyze the domain knowledge and eloquently express the domain assumptions.