Ontology Engineering

An introduction to ontology engineering is an award-winning textbook aimed at postgraduate students in computer science. The second edition was published by College Publications in September 2025.

It is for sale as softcover hardcopy from multiple online sales points, including Amazon (.com, .co.uk, .de, .au etc.), B&N, and others. The softcover hardcopy is supposed to cost around 32 GBP (or around 43 USD or 37 EUR), and it serves to shop around if it’s wildly off the mark. ISBN-10 848900201 and ISBN-13 978-1848900202. The ebook should cost around half that.

The main additional content, such as materials for exercises, supporting tools, and tutorials, is currently available from the academic page of the book at https://people.cs.uct.ac.za/~mkeet/OEbook/ and its mirror site at http://www.meteck.org/teaching/OEbook/.

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Version 1.5 was released in February 2020 as an open educational resource. This means that the PDF is freely downloadable from the academic webpage and there are additional resources related to the textbook at https://people.cs.uct.ac.za/~mkeet/OEbook/.

The first edition was published with College Publications in 2018, and is probably still for sale as softcover hardcopy through Amazon and many other online bookstores (ISBN-10: 1848902956, ISBN-13: ‎ 978-1848902954).

It’s cheaper than the second edition, but not as up-to-date, has less content, is in a smaller format, printed in B&W only, and a few sections may not be as well-written as they are in the second edition.

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The Workbook

There is a workbook associated with the second edition of the textbook. It can also be used with version 1.5, except for the references to the textbook sections, which may have changed between the two editions. The workbook is an open educational resource and accessible here.

The workbook contains four tutorials, two assignment descriptions, and answer to selected exercises from the second edition of the textbook.

Elsewhere

The first version and v1.5 of the textbook are also available in various institutional repositories, such as OpenUCT and the Open Textbook Archive, and people in charge of other archives and indexes have added it to other archives as well, including, but not limited to unglue.it (featured in the week of 13-8-2018), Open Libra, and the EBooks Directory. LibreText has been converting the textbook into HTML.

The book or its predecessor lecture notes and/or the slides based on it [is being/was/has been/will be] used in whole or in part in the following courses/at the following universities (in alphabetical order):

  • Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy
  • National Institute of Technology Patna, India
  • Open Universteit, the Netherlands
  • Otto Von Guericke University, Germany
  • Tshwane University of Technology, South Africa
  • Umeå University, Sweden
  • Universidad de las Ciencias Informáticas, Cuba
  • Universita Politecnica di Milano, Italy
  • Universität Leipzig, Germany
  • University of Cape Town, South Africa
  • University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
  • University of Liverpool, UK
  • University of Swansea, UK
  • …
    (If you use it and would like it to be listed here, please contact me.)

Reviews and endorsements

I was very happy to find and read this book. It is the only comprehensive introduction to information / computing ontologies I am aware of. I especially appreciated the way it connects the computer science content with formal logic and even ontologies as they are understood in philosophy.

— Anonymous reviewer on Amazon, 2021

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Das Buch von C. Maria Keet ist ein sehr guter Leitfaden für die Erstellung von Ontologien. Nicht nur Einführung, sondern auch praktische Hinführung, die einem wöchentlichen (studentischen) Arbeitsplan angepasst ist; inklusive Hinweise, wie man die Qualität der (eigenen) Ontologie kontrollieren kann.

— SapphireSaTi on Amazon

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(more TBA soon)