Towards a Software Centric Approach for Ontology Development: Novel Methodology and its Application

Abstract

The last few years have witnessed a paradigm shift in World Wide Web, from a global information space of connected documents to Semantic Web. It has been observed that the ontologies are playing a pivotal role in the growth of Semantic Web as it offers an effective knowledge representation with appropriate formalisms. Semantic Web technologies based on ontology have emerged as an appropriate engineering solution to the problems of developing systems that assure the integration of data from different sources with high end interoperability to provide seamless services to web users. Development of domain ontology exhibits both structural and logical complexity comparable to the development of software systems. However, the first one is more complex compared to any form of software development due to various factors. Though they are two complementary engineering branches, the maturity and popularity level of later is too high compared to the former. Unlike Software Engineering, absence of effective methodologies eligible to claim the tag 'standardized' aimed at supporting the development of ontology restricts the availability of large scale domain ontologies. Methodologies leveraged from Software Engineering to ontology development by extending the matured process models can bridge the gap between the above mentioned engineering branches to a significant extent. This paper proposes a software centric novel methodology for ontology development with a defined Ontology Development Life Cycle (ODLC) in terms of stages, workflows, activities and techniques. The applicability of the proposed methodology has been shown by developing prototype ontology.