Towards a methodology for ontology based model engineering
Nicola Guarino, Christopher A. Welty · 2000
The philosophical discipline of Ontology is evolving towards an engineering discipline, and in this evolution the need for a principled methodology has clearly arisen. In this paper, we briefly discuss our recent work towards developing a methodology for ontology-based model engineering. This methodology builds on previous methodology efforts, and is founded on important analytic notions that have been drawn from Philosophy and adapted to Engineering: identity, unity, rigidity, and dependence. We demonstrate how these techniques can be used to analyze properties, which clarifies many misconceptions about taxonomies and helps bring substantial order to ontologies. Introduction Ontologies are becoming increasingly popular in practice, and the number of poor quality ontologies have made clear the need for a principled methodology for building them. Perhaps the most common problem we have seen in practice with ontologies is that, while they are expected to bring order and stru...