Ontology engineering: Current state, challenges, and future directions

In the last decade, ontologies have become widely adopted in a variety of fields ranging from biomedicine, to finance, engineering, law, and cultural heritage. The ontology engineering field has been strengthened by the adoption of several standards pertaining to ontologies, by the development or e xtension of ontology building tools, and by a wider recognition of the importance of standardized vocabularies and formalized semantics. Research into ontology engineering has also produced methods and tools that are used more and more in production settings. Despite all these advancements, ontology engineering is still a difficult process, and many challenges still remain to be solved. This paper gives an overview of how the ontology engineering field has evolved in the last decade and discusses some of the unsolved issues and opportunities for future research.