Re-engineering approach to build domain ontologies

Abstract

Building ontology is changing from being an art to be a science. There are many attempts to re-engineer the process of building ontology [4], to categorize the applications that use ontology for better understanding [23], to study the common features of well-known existing ontologies [18], to provide environment and tools for ontology development [5], and to provide theoretical foundations for ontology [10]. In our experience of building ontological-base tendering system [15], we face the problem of building ontology. From these efforts and from our experience we demonstrate how to build ontologies for tendering process domain using conceptual graphs. Instead of reinventing the wheel, we reverse engineer EDI structures to build abstract ontology for tendering structures. Also, we use data-mining techniques to build abstract domain ontology from existing on-line catalogs. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2001.