The Role of the Global Engineer

Abstract

We outline some requirements for a comprehensive methodology for building ontologies and review some important work that has been done in the area which could contribute to this goal We describe our own experiences in constructing a signi cant ontology emphasising the ontology capture phase We rst consider the very general issue of categorisation in modelling and relate it to the process of ontology capture We then describe the procedure that we used to identify the terms and produce de nitions We describe a successful way to handle ambiguous terms which can be an enormous obstacle to reaching a shared understanding Other important ndings include it may not be necessary to identify competency questions before building the ontology the meta ontology can be chosen after detailed text de nitions are produced de ning terms which are cognitively basic rst can lead to less re work