A Study of Ontology Construction

Abstract

Ontology has been recognized, and prominently used, as tool to facilitate shared understanding (and knowledge sharing) in a particular domain. Ensuring that such an ontology is relevant to a particular domain, however, remains a challenging task to the ontology developer. Motivated by the lack of consistent holistic guidelines to assist development of ontologies that are industry-relevant, the goal of this chapter is to present such an approach. The presented approach is based on the synthesis of existing approaches and varied sources of academic and industry input. The approach follows a typical ontology development cycle and consists of incremental steps that need to be taken to assure industry-relevance of the ontology. To provide a thorough discussion of the approach, the authors utilize a previously completed ontology development project that followed the developed approach. The project was specifically aimed at developing an industry-relevant ontology for the compliance management domain and was based on three main inputs, namely, scholarly articles, industry expert/practitioner input and industry reports. Their experience indicates that the use of the ontology development approach promotes an ontology that is closely aligned with the needs of industry.