Designing and Evaluating Generic Ontologies
Michael Grüninger · 2007
One of the many uses of ontologies has been the modelling of problems and domains in such areas as business process reengineering (where we need an integrated model of the enterprise and its processes, its organisations, its goals, and its customers), in distributed multiagent architectures (where different agents need to communicate and solve problems), and in concurrent engineering and design. We use ontologies for modelling problems and domains. Ontologies are intended to provide an “easy to re-use” library of class objects for modelling the problems and domains. The ultimate goal of this approach is the construction of a library of ontologies which can be reused and adapted to different general classes of problems and environments. However, many ontologies are informal in the sense that they provide have no semantics or axiomatizations. We need a framework for specifying the semantics of object classes and relations in the ontology. The methodology in this paper supports the formalization of informal ontologies and the integration and reuse of these ontologies. In these cases we have terminology with no or weak axiomatization; the goal is to write sufficient axioms to adequately capture the intended semantics. The fundamental challenge is to give some guidance as to the kinds of axioms an ontological engineer needs to write. In [Gruninger and Fox 95], we presented a methodology for the design and evaluation of ontologies. For any given ontology, the goal is to agree upon a shared terminology and set of constraints on the objects in the ontology. We must agree on the purpose and ultimate use of our ontologies. We must therefore provide a mechanism guiding the design of ontologies, as well as providing a framework for evaluating the adequacy of these ontologies. Such a framework allows a more precise evaluation of different proposals for an ontology, by demonstrating the competency of each proposal with respect to the set of questions that arise from the applications. These justify the existence and properties of the objects within the ontology. In this paper, we refine this methodology to