Ontology-Driven Method Engineering for Information Systems Development

Abstract

Information systems development has to deal with evolving technologies and changing environments. Therefore, the engineering of methods as the problem of creating suitable instruments for new situations is critical to information systems development. The failure of IS development projects shows that method engineering is an open field. The question is if and how research on ontology can contribute to overcome the current situation. We show, based on linguistic and philosophical findings, how ontology can be used as linchpin in method engineering. We found that the language critique approach of Kamlah and Lorenzen (1984) provides the means to create ontologies by linguistic actions and that ontologies are always related to language communities sharing the knowledge of using a common language in communication processes. We present an ontology-driven engineering method for information systems development. Our method helps to create required language constructs to handle new situations. The ontology-driven engineering method is demonstrated using an elaborate example case.