Combining Ontology Engineering Subprocesses to Build a Time Ontology

摘要

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.