Methods for Ontology Development

Abstract

Ontology, as defined by Gruber, is an “explicit specification of a conceptualization.” This definition is enough to convey an understanding of what ontologies are and for what they are. The main reasons to build an ontology are information sharing and the possibility of reusing knowledge about specific domains (Goméz-Peréz et al. 2004). Understanding what ontologies are for, however, does not provide much help in building them. According to Guarino and Welty (2002), “the ontology discipline is evolving into a discipline of its own and in this process the need for a methodology is clearly arising.”