A Study Investigating Typical Concepts and Guidelines for Ontology Building
It addresses the need for standardized ontology development practices in semantic technologies, but is incremental as it synthesizes existing concepts rather than introducing new methods.
The paper tackles the problem of providing clear guidelines for ontology building by answering key questions about components, structure, reuse, complexity, design principles, and evaluation, presenting a set of guiding principles for developers and users.
In semantic technologies, the shared common understanding of the structure of information among artifacts (people or software agents) can be realized by building an ontology. To do this, it is imperative for an ontology builder to answer several questions: a) what are the main components of an ontology? b) How an ontology look likes and how it works? c) Verify if it is required to consider reusing existing ontologies or not? c) What is the complexity of the ontology to be developed? d) What are the principles of ontology design and development? e) How to evaluate an ontology? This paper answers all the key questions above. The aim of this paper is to present a set of guiding principles to help ontology developers and also inexperienced users to answer such questions.