NeOn Methodology for Building Ontology Networks: Specification, Scheduling and Reuse

Abstract

A new ontology development paradigm has started; its emphasis lies on the reuse and possible subsequent reengineering of knowledge resources, on the collaborative and argumentative ontology development, and on the building of ontology networks; this new trend is the opposite of building new ontologies from scratch. To help ontology developers in this new paradigm, it is important to provide strong methodological support.
This thesis presents some contributions to the methodological area of the Ontology Engineering field that we are sure will improve the development and building of ontologies networks, and thus,
- It proposes the NeOn Glossary of Processes and Activities, which identifies and defines the processes and activities potentially involved when ontology networks are collaboratively built.
- It defines a set of two ontology network life cycle models.
- It identifies and describes a collection of nine scenarios for building ontology networks.
- It provides some methodological guidelines for performing the ontology requirements specification activity, to obtain the requirements that the ontology should fulfil.
- It offers some methodological guidelines for obtaining the ontology network life cycle for a concrete ontology network, as part of scheduling ontology projects. Additionally, the thesis provides the technological support to these guidelines: a tool called gOntt.
- It also proposes some methodological guidelines for the reuse of ontological resources at two different levels of granularity: as a whole (general ontologies and domain ontologies) and using ontology statements.