Ontology Engineering Revisited: An Iterative Case Study

Existing mature ontology engineering approaches are based on some basic assumptions that are often violated in practice, in particular in the Semantic Web. Ontologies often need to be built in a decentralized way, ontologies must be given to a community in a way such that individuals have partial autonomy over them and ontologies have a life cycle that involves an iteration back and forth between construction/modification and use. While recently there have been some initial proposals to consider these issues, they lack the appropriate rigor of mature approaches. i.e. these recent proposals lack the appropriate depth of methodological description, which makes the methodology usable, and they lack a proof of concept by a long-lived case study. In this paper, we revisit mature and new ontology engineering methodologies. We provide an elaborate methodology that takes decentralization, partial autonomy and iteration into account and we demonstrate its proof-of-concept in a real-world cross-organizational case study.