Ontology Engineering and Evolution in a Distributed World Using DILIGENT

Abstract

Existing mature ontology engineering approaches are based on some basic assumptions that are often neglected in practice. Ontologies often need to be built in a decentralized way, ontologies must be given to a community in a way such that individuals have partial autonomy over them, ontologies have a life cycle that involves an iteration back and forth between construction/modification and use and ontologies should support the participation of non-expert users in ontology engineering processes. While recently there have been some initial proposals to consider these issues, they lack the appropriate rigor of mature approaches. i.e. these recent proposals lack the appropriate depth of methodological description, which makes the methodology usable, and they lack a proof of concept by concrete cases studies. In this paper, we describe the DILIGENT methodology that takes decentralization, partial autonomy, iteration and non-expert builders into account and we demonstrate its proof-of- concept in two real-world organizational case studies.