Achieving maturity: The state of practice in ontology engineering in 2009

Abstract

In this paper we give an account of the current state of practice in ontology engineering (OE) based on the findings of a 6 months empirical survey that analyzed 148 OE projects. The survey focused on process-related issues and looked into the impact of research achievements on real-world OE projects, the complexity of particular ontology development tasks, the level of tool support, and the usage scenarios for ontologies. The main contributions of this survey are twofold: 1) the size of the data set is larger than every other similar endeavor; 2) the findings of the survey confirm that OE is an established engineering discipline w.r.t the maturity and level of acceptance of its main components, methodologies, etc. whereas further research should target economic aspects of OE and the customization of existing technology to the specifics of vertical domains. © Springer-Verlag 2009.