Combining ontology engineering subprocesses to build a time ontology

In the Ontology Engineering area several processes to ease the time consuming and complex task of ontology building have been proposed. In this paper we describe how a Time ontology was built by means of reuse - in our case using a composition/integration approach - following an evolving prototyping life cycle. This particular process involved several complex subprocesses: knowledge acquisition and requirement specification using Natural Language techniques, reverse engineering, knowledge representation translation, technical evaluation. We show how they can all be combined and describe the techniques and best practices that were used. We discuss the interesting features of this process, namely effort required. Finally, we analyze what is changing in ontology building and compare this particular process with a modern software engineering approach, the Rational Unified Process.

[1]  Michael Gruninger,et al.  Methodology for the Design and Evaluation of Ontologies , 1995, IJCAI 1995.

[2]  Vinay K. Chaudhri,et al.  Using Prior Knowledge: Problems and Solutions , 2000, AAAI/IAAI.

[3]  Martin L. King,et al.  Towards a Methodology for Building Ontologies , 1995 .

[4]  H. Sofia Pinto,et al.  Some Issues on Ontology Integration , 1999, IJCAI 1999.

[5]  James F. Allen.  Towards a General Theory of Action and Time , 1984, Artif. Intell..

[6]  Ieee Standards Board.  IEEE Standard for developing software life cycle processes , 1992 .

[7]  Helena Sofia Pinto,et al.  Reusing a Time Ontology , 2003, ICEIS.

[8]  Helena Sofia Pinto,et al.  Evolving Ontologies in Distributed and Dynamic Settings , 2002, KR.

[9]  H. S. Pinto.  Towards Ontology Reuse , 2003 .

[10]  Asunción Gómez-Pérez,et al.  METHONTOLOGY: From Ontological Art Towards Ontological Engineering , 1997, AAAI 1997.

[11]  H. Sofia Pinto,et al.  A methodology for ontology integration , 2001, K-CAP '01.

[12]  Stefan Decker,et al.  Creating Semantic Web Contents with Protégé-2000 , 2001, IEEE Intell. Syst..

[13]  Philippe Kruchten,et al.  The Rational Unified Process: An Introduction, Second Edition , 2000 .

[14]  Asunción Gómez-Pérez,et al.  Ontological Reengineering for Reuse , 1999, EKAW.

[15]  P. Krutchen,et al.  The Rational Unified Process: An Introduction , 2000 .

[16]  Philippe Kruchten,et al.  The Rational Unified Process: An Introduction , 1998 .

[17]  Philippe Kruchten,et al.  What Is the Rational Unified Process ? , 2001 .

[18]  Robert M. MacGregor,et al.  Practical Experiences in Trading Off Ontology Usability and Reusability , 1999 .