An Ontology for Intra-Campus Transport System (ICTS) (A Case Study of the University of Ibadan Campus)

Knowledge representation can greatly improve the effectiveness and efficiency of an organization, business or firm if its benefits are properly harnessed. Ontology is a knowledge representation technique that involves formalization of world knowledge. Existing transport-related ontologies have not really captured and represented the basics of a transport system. This has made it difficult for information systems and machines to access, understand and share basic knowledge about transport domain. The Intra-Campus Transport System (ICTS) which handles the transportation of people within an institution can therefore serve as a prototype for transport systems. This research work is therefore aimed at developing a formal ontology for the intra-campus transport system which enhances availability of knowledge and a quick retrieval system. A very thorough knowledge engineering approach is adopted for this research work. It involves knowledge gathering, also known as ontology capture which gives important factual knowledge that exists in the ICTS domain. This is followed by knowledge refining and analysis, which involves categorizing the gathered knowledge into classes, properties and individuals. Knowledge formalization is used to translate the refined knowledge into a logical form using description logic tools. Lastly, the logical axioms were implemented with web ontology language (OWL) format using Protégé 5.0.