The usable ontology: An environment for building and assessing a domain ontology

Abstract

Experience shows that the quality of the stored knowledge determines the success (therefore the effective usage) of an ontology. In fact, an ontology where relevant concepts are absent, or are not conformant to a domain view of a given community, will be scarcely used, or even disregarded. In this paper we present a method and a set of software tools aimed at supporting domain experts in populating a domain ontology and obtaining a shared consensus on its content. "Consensus" is achieved in an implicit and explicit way: implicitly, since candidate concepts are selected among the terms that are frequently and consistently referred in the documents produced by the virtual community of users; explicitly, through the use of a web-based groupware aimed at consensus building. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2002.