A Formal Ontology for Special Needs Conditions

Ontology deals with the conceptualization of domain concepts and the relationships among them while special needs conditions refer to any condition that requires assistance ranging from disability to giftedness and talentedness. Unified categorization of special needs conditions and the availability of comprehensive facts and knowledge about each category of special needs conditions have become major problems in the field of special education. It is, therefore, necessary to develop an ontology for special needs conditions that will unify the knowledge and fact about special needs conditions to support various decision-making in the special education domain. Hence, this research builds a formal ontology for special needs conditions that unifies the major categories of special needs conditions which are disability and giftedness, and talentedness, and includes various assistive technology that is applicable to each nature of special needs conditions. The knowledge engineering method was used to build the ontology while the language of formalization is Description logic. Web ontology language in protégé was used to implement the work and evaluated with competency questions in form of simple queries. This ontology can be adopted in all special education domains to forestall the problem of information overloading and inconsistency. Keywords: Special needs conditions, Assistive technology, Ontology, Protégé. CISDI Journal Reference Format Adebayo, E.O., Ayorinde, I.T & Akinkunmi, B.O. (2023): A Formal Ontology for Special Needs Conditions. Computing, Information Systems, Development Informatics Journal. Vol 14 No 2, Pp 31-60. Available online at https://www.isteams.net/cisdijournal. dx.doi.org/10.22624/AIMS/CISDI/V14N2P4xx