ONTOLOGY DEVELOPMENT METHODOLOGY

Abstract

ABSTRACT For about a decade, ontologies have been known in computer science as explicit specifications of shared conceptualizations. Researchers have written much about the potential benefits of using them, and most of us regard ontologies as central building blocks of the Semantic Web and other semantic systems. There is much work already existent on their definitions, construction and development and their applications. All these literature define the set of activities that concern the ontology development process, the ontology lifecycle, the principles, methods and methodologies for building ontologies and the tool suites and languages that support them. The construction of ontology can allow users or agents of software/service to arrive at consistent views about organization structure of information with same semantics. However, since domains differ in principles, theories and techniques underlying them, there is no existing methodology that could work as the standard method for ontology construction at the present time. Unfortunately, still not much quality ontologies have been developed. This implies that the Semantic Web community has yet to build practically useful ontologies for a lot of relevant domains in order to make the Semantic Web a reality. Indeed, several social and technical issues exist that cause problems in development of ontologies. In this work we provide an overview of what ontology is, describing the current trends, issues and problems in constructing them. We also propose an ontology development methodology On-to-Methodology that could be used as a standard model for ontology development tasks across various domains. We have automated the development process by implementing a tool for Ontology design process. We illustrate our methodology by developing Ontology of Bikes. We then compare our methodology with other existing ontology development methodologies.