CivilOnto: An Ontology Based on Persian Articles Published in Civil Engineering Domain

The present research aims to represent the terms and concepts of civil engineering and thus design its domain structure in the form of ontology. This is an applied research and the qualitative content analysis method with summative approach is used. The research population is 12309 published articles in the scientific journals (1983 to 2016), indexed in the full-text Persian articles database at Regional Information Center for Science and Technology (RICeST). Data collection was done via SQL queries from the RICeST database. The content analysis was used to create a conceptual model of the civil engineering domain and to explain the relationships and instances. To create the conceptual model, there were consulted with 10 Subject experts in civil engineering area. The process of ontology creation has been done through METHONTOLOGY methodology and protégé ontology management software (Beta 5 edition). The made-artifact of this research has 283 concepts, along with 62 object properties, 79 data type properties, 10 annotative properties, and 976 instances. In total, in the present research, 151 semantic properties were identified between the concepts. The results of this research can serve as a guide for the RICeST experts in order to identify the users’ needs and facilitate the users’ interaction with RICeST databases. This can also provide the users with access to more relevant resources. This ontology can also be served as a layer of semantic web in these databases.