YAMO: Yet Another Methodology for large-scale faceted Ontology construction

Abstract

Purpose – This paper aims to propose a brand new ontology development methodology, called Yet Another Methodology for Ontology (YAMO) and demonstrate, step by step, the building of a formally defined large-scale faceted ontology for food. Design/methodology/approach – YAMO is motivated by facet analysis and an analytico-synthetic classification approach. The approach ensures quality of the system precisely; it makes the system flexible, hospitable, extensible, sturdy, dense and complete. YAMO consists of two-way approaches: top-down and bottom-up. Based on YAMO, domain food, formally defined as large-scale ontology, is designed. To design the ontology and to define the scope and boundary of the domain, a group of people were interviewed to get a practical overview, which provided more insight to the theoretical understanding of the domain. Findings – The result obtained from evaluating the ontology is a very impressive one. Based on the study, it was found that 94 per cent of the user’s queries were successfully met. This shows the efficiency and effectiveness of the YAMO methodology. An evaluator opined that the ontology is very deep and exhaustive. Practical implications – The authors envision that the current work will have great implications on ontology developers and practitioners. YAMO will allow ontologists to construct a very deep, high-quality and large-scale ontology. Originality/value – This paper illustrates a brand new ontology development methodology and demonstrates how the methodology can be applied to build a large-scale high-quality domain ontology.