Phases in Ontology Building Methodologies

Although there are several established methodologies in the ontological engineering field, many researchers tend to only loosely couple their ontology development with these methodologies, because the maturity of the methodologies has been questioned. In this chapter, the authors pay special attention to the ontology development process with a particular focus on analyzing the phases proposed by these methodologies with the objective of creating and proposing suitable phases for building ontology, covering the drawbacks of the existing methodologies for building ontology, while at the same time benefiting from the advantages included in them. Since ontology is becoming increasingly important for supporting a diversity of activities of knowledge management processes, in general, and for enterprise systems in particular, it is important to understand the existing work and how researchers develop their ontologies. Within this context, the authors analyze three ontologies that have been developed in the area of enterprise systems and knowledge management to see the conformance of each ontology development with respect to the proposed phases. As a result, they find that the three developed ontologies reflect the lack of standard and general methodological guidelines, which in turn leads to the production of a not well-informed ontology, hindrance to reuse, and extensive and time-consuming work in the development process.