An integrated approach to ontology development with requirements management at the heart of it ensures all the phases of the methodology are bound together. Besides, having requirements management at the heart of the approach ensures traceability throughout the execution and helps to factor in the inter-dependencies across the ontology development cycle phases. In addition, it helps to avoid an over-the-wall approach and concentrate on ontology development as a traceable and iterative process.
The starting point for the integrated ontology development approach is the goal and scope definition phase. This phase also covers the domain and subject area of the ontology and the requirements for the subsequent phases. During the next information gathering and elicitation phase, a deeper understanding of the domain is gained, making it sometimes necessary to revise and refine the original goal and scope definition.
In the initial structuring phase- identifying trends, rationalizing and structuring the gathered information is performed by leveraging information organization methodologies. Refining the information leads to finding out what works as potential classes, relations, and logic for an ontology.
During the formalization phase, which follows the initial structuring phase, encoding, refining, and testing the initial structures as a formal model expressed in a chosen knowledge representation formalism is completed. Also, classes, relations, logic, etcetera are captured.
The deployment phase is concerned with ontology publishing and its release and scaling it into an ontology-driven system. Further, knowledge graphs are built and work necessary for fully instantiating, integrating, and interfacing the ontology is performed and tested.
The final phase in the integrated ontology development phase is the evaluation phase. It requires looking back at the goal and scope definition phase and assessing the extent to which the aims, objectives, and requirements in the context of the established scope has been accomplished. In the context of the methodology, ontology development is viewed as a knowledge management activity, and for this reason, it is essential to conduct, for example, lessons learned reviews for continuous improvement purposes. This then feeds back into the goal and scope definition phase to meet future ontology development cycles' needs.
Click here to read the original article published by Tish Chungoora.
Please give your feedback on this article or share a similar story for publishing by clicking here.
