Survey of Ontology Engineering
Methodologies
22071062 Aettie Ji
Intelligent E-Commerce System Lab.
OUTLINE
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Part 1 – Review of Chap. 9 in “Semantic Web Technologies”,
Davies, J., R. Studer and P. Warren, WILEY
 Introduction
 The Methodology Focus
 Past and Current Research
 DILIGENT Methodology
 Discussion and Next Step
Part 2 - Brief Introduction of NeOn Methodology, NeON
Project, http://www.neon-project.org
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Part1 - Ontology Engineering
Methodologies
Sure, Y., C. Tempich and D. Vrandecic
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Introduction
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Methodologies of traditional knowledge management
systems(KMS)  Centralized Approach
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Domain experts who provide the model for the knowledge
Ontology engineers who structure and formalize it
Decentralized knowledge management systems 
Methodologies based on traditional, centralized KMS are
no longer feasible.
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Methodology Focus
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Ontology Engineering Methodology
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Ontology management activities
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Ontology development activities
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Scheduling of the ontology engineering task
Control mechanism and quality assurance steps.
Procedures to specify, conceptualize, formalize, and implement
ontology (which is defined for environment and feasibility study)
Guidance for the maintenance, population, use, and evolution of the
ontology.
Ontology support activities
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Knowledge acquisition, evaluation, integration, merging and alignment,
and configuration management.
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Methodology Focus
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Documentation
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Results of each activities
Sometime the decision making process itself
Evaluation
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Means to measure the quality of the created ontology
Difficult!!  in most cases, modeling decisions are subjective.
Measures derived from statistical data or philosophical
principles.
OntoClean (Guarino and Welty, 2002)
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Past and Current Research
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Methodologies
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UPON, (Nicole et al., 2005)
HCONE (Kotis et al., 2004)
OTK Methodology (Sure, 2003)
OntoWeb project, (Leger et al., 2002)
CommonKADS, (Schreiber et al., 1999)
DOGMA, (Jarrar and Meersman , 2002)
The Enterprise Ontology, (Uschod and King, 1995)
The KACTUS, (Bernaras et al., 1996)
METHODOLOGY, (Fernandez-Lopez et al., 1999)
Etc.
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Past and Current Research
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Discussion and Open Issues
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Ontology maintenance support.
Distributed ontology engineering.
Fine-grained guidelines for all phases.
Representation of multiple views.
Agreement support under conflicting interests.
Best practices.
Ontology engineering with the help of automated methods.
Process definition by single process step combination.
Integration into business process model.
Cost estimation and pricing.
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Past and Current Research
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Ontology Engineering Tools
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KAON OImodeller (Bozsak et al., 2002; Motika et al., 2002)
Protégé (Noy et al., 2000)
WebODE (Arptrez et al., 2001)
OntoEdit(=OntoStudio) (Sure et al., 2002, 2003)
Open Issues
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Support for an arbitrary process
Inter-operability
Technical solution to support versioning, ontology learning
or distributed engineering of ontologies
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DILIGENT Methodology
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Assumptions
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The users:
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Several experts involved in collaboratively building the same
ontology who are also users.
Much larger community of users than the community of experts.
Birds-eye view:
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Users are free to use and modify an initial ontology locally.
A central board maintains and assures the quality of the core
ontology.
The board is responsible for updating the core ontology.
The board only loosely controls the process.
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DILIGENT Methodology
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Main Steps
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Build
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An initial ontology doesn’t have to be complete,
It should be relatively small for easy access.
Local adaptation
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Users work with the core ontology and adopt it locally to their
own needs.
They are not allowed to directly change the shared ontology.
The control board collects changes requests to it and logs local
adaptation.
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DILIGENT Methodology
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Main Steps
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Analysis
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The board analyses the local ontologies and the requests for
changes and tries to identify similarities in users’ ontologies.
Deciding which changes are going to be introduced in the
next version of the shared ontology is crucial activity of the board.
Revision
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The board should regularly revise the shared ontology realigning
users needs and gaining higher acceptance, ‘sharedness’ and less
local differences.
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DILIGENT Methodology
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Main Steps
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Revision
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Users can be involved in ontology development and evaluate the
ontology from an usability point of view.
Domain experts evaluates it from a domain point of view.
Knowledge engineers evaluates it from a domain and technical
point of view.
Ontology engineers are responsible for technical evaluation,
including analyzing and balancing arguments, and updating the
ontology.
Local Update
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User can update their own local ontologies to better use the
knowledge represented in the new version.
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DILIGENT Methodology
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DILIGENT Methodology
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Argumentation Support
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The exchange of arguments should be embedded into a
general argumentation framework.
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Facilitating the ontology engineering and evaluation process.
Offering more fine-grained guidance to achieve agreement.
The creation of a shared conceptualization without any
guidance is almost impossible, or time consuming.
Argumentation model of DILIGENT
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Two virtual chat room, one for providing topics for discussion, hand
raising and voting and the other one for exchanging arguments.
Due to the stricter procedural rule agreement is reached more
quickly and a much wider consensus is reached.
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Conclusion and Next Steps
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With DILIGENT methodology, some of open issues are
tackled and proposed a methodology which allows continuous
improvement of the underlying ontology in distributed setting.
The methodology is still under development to cover
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The improved quality of the results of current ontology learning
methods.
A more fine-grained process model.
Criteria to identify proper ontology evaluation scheme.
Tools for a more automatic appliance of such evaluation technique.
Integration the process model into a knowledge management business
model.
The estimation of costs incurred by the building process.
Capturing experiences and describing best practices from application.
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Part 2 – Brief Introduction of
NeOn Methodology
NeOn Project
http://www.neon-project.org
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Comparison of Presented Methodologies
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Comparison of Presented Methodologies
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Regarding NeOn dimensions,
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In the collaboration dimension, none of the methodologies
consider distributed ontology engineering. (DILIGENT does it,
but it only provides a rich argumentation framework.)
In context dimension, none of them treat with it.
None of them provide guidelines for treating the dynamic and
evolution of the ontology.
None of them provide detailed guidelines for the
process or activities.
None of them are described targeted to software
developers and ontology practitioners.
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Aim within the NeOn Project
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Creation of the NeOn methodology for building ontology
networks covering the drawbacks of the three
methodologies and benefiting from the advantages
included in such methodologies.
NeOn methodology will include the benefits provided by
DILGENT about collaboration.
Furthermore, it will take into account the proposal of
METHONTOLOGY and On-To-Knowledge about the
use of competency questions for the ontology
specification activity.
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When do Ontologies become
Ontology Network?
If there is a requirement or it is advisable to express meta
relationship, for example
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priorVersionOf
useImports
extendingBy
composedByModules
haveMapping
Ontology permits a fluent knowledge sharing and an
easy enrichment of the network.
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NeOn Ontology Development Process
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Consensus reaching process
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NeOn glossary of activities
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For the identification and definition of the activities involved in
the ontology network development process.
Definitions of the activities involved in ontology network
construction, which have been collaboratively built and
consensuated by all NeOn partners, by means of the consensus
reaching process.
NeOn Table of “Recommended and If-Applicable”
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A classification of the activities required for the development
of ontology networks and those that are applicable, but not
required, and, therefore, they are non-essential or dispensable.
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NeOn Ontology Development Process
Development
Activities
Environment Study
Feasibility Study
O. Specification
O. Conceptualization
O. Formalization
O. Implementation
O. Integration
O. Mapping
O. Merging
O.
O.
O.
O.
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Enrichment
Extension
Specialization
Update
Upgrade
Versioning
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O.
Use
Activities
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Maintenance
Activities
Knowledge Acquisition
O. Elicitation
O. Learning
O. Evolution
O. Evaluation
O. Summarization
O. Validation
O. Verification
O. Transforming
Pruning
O. Reuse
O. Documentation
Diagnosis O. Modularization
O. Searching
O. Module Extraction O. Selection
Repair
Alignment O. Partitioning
Configuration Management
O. Translating O. Population
O. Assessment
O. Combining
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Scenarios for Building Ontology
Networks
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9 identified NeOn scenarios for building ontology
network.
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Scenario 1: Building ontology networks from scratch without
reusing existing knowledge resources.
Scenario 2: Building ontology networks by reusing and
reengineering non ontological resources.
Scenario 3: Building ontology networks by reusing ontological
resources.
Scenario 4: Building ontology networks by reusing and
reengineering ontological resources.
Scenario 5: Building ontology networks by reusing and merging
ontological resources.
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Scenarios for Building Ontology
Networks
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9 identified NeOn scenarios for building ontology
network.
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Scenario 6: Building ontology networks by reusing, merging and
reengineering ontological resources.
Scenario 7: Building ontology networks by reusing ontology
design patterns.
Scenario 8: Building ontology networks by restructuring
ontological resources.
Scenario 9: Building ontology networks by localizing ontological
resources.
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Scenarios in the Ontology Life Cycle
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Life Cycle of Ontology Networks
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NeOn Life Cycle Models
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Waterfall Ontology Network Life Cycle Model
Incremental Ontology Network Life Cycle Model
Iterative Ontology Network Life Cycle Model
Evolving Prototyping Ontology Network Life Cycle Model
Spiral Ontology Network Life Cycle Model
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Conclusions and References
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Which one are the activities involved in the ontology
development process?
Which one is the goal of each activity?
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NeOn Glossary of Activities
NeOnTable of “Recommended and If-Applicable”
NeOn Development Process
When should I carry out each activity?
Where is the relationship of one activity with the others?
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Ontology Network Life Cycle models
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Conclusions and References
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Where can I find ontologies with the goal of reusing them?
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Ontology Metadata Vocabulary
Ontology Registries
How can I build the ontology for my application?
Do I need a single ontology or an ontology network?
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Several examples from NeOn deliverables 5.3.1 and 5.4.1.
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