The School of Information Technology & Computing (SITC), in conjunction with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Yola Professional Chapter, delivered a presentation on ontology.
On a general note, ontology is a collection of terms for the description and representation of a knowledge area. It is applied in systems to capture the relationships between entities to enhance knowledge management.
Dr. Ignace Djitog of SITC was the presenter at the March 4, 2020, seminar which concentrated on Ontology for Healthcare System Simulation (O4HS).
Dr. Djitog told the audience that the benefits of using ontology in different areas of educational research including the IT & Computing sector cannot be overemphasized. Ontology is developed by researchers and scientists to share a common understanding of the structure of information among people or software agents.
"Ontology enables reuse of domain knowledge, make domain assumptions explicit, and eases separation of domain knowledge from the operational knowledge. It also aids the analysis of domain knowledge."
In the field of IT & Computer Science, ontology is simply a formal representation of knowledge using a group of notions within a particular domain and the relationships between those notions. This will bring about effective control and easy access to data, he highlighted.
"O4HS ontology is a holistic representation of the healthcare system based on agreed-upon definitions of common assumptions used in the healthcare simulation domain."
He further said that the major benefits of using O4HS include common representation of healthcare models from different simulation platforms, querying simulation models, and browsing.
A Ph.D. student from Oxford Brookes University, Zainab Usman Atiku, who attended the seminar noted that ontology is a very interesting concept as she has applied it in her current research termed semantic web on photovoltaic systems.
"The end product of my research work is a system that would provide virtually all information (such as manufacturers, specifications, and the prices) of different kinds of photovoltaic systems an end-user could seek."
Ms. Atiku perceives ontology as a formal conceptualization or definition of knowledge. It can be used to represent any form of data, be it unstructured, semi-structured or structured data because in the long run ontology enables smoother data integration, easier mining of abstract ideas, and data-driven analytics.
Reported by Rofiat Adekunle