A generic task ontology for scheduling applications

An ontology can be seen as a reference model to describe the entities which exist in an universe of discourse and their properties. These entities may be individuals, classes, relationships, and functions. In sum anything that may be useful to describe specific models. In this paper we present a generic task ontology for scheduling problems. The ontology is generic in the sense that it is both domain and application independent. We refer to it as a ‘task ontology’ to emphasise that it describes the class of scheduling tasks, independently of the various ways by which these tasks can be solved. The proposed task ontology has been successfully validated to measure its knowledge capturing capability. Our aim is to move beyond current brittle approaches to system development to provide firm theoretical and engineering foundations to various classes of knowledge-based applications. Keyword: Intelligent Scheduling, Ontologies, Knowledge Modelling, Knowledge Acquisition, Reuse.