An Ontology based on the Methodology Proposed by Ushold and King

Introduction

The term ‘Ontology’ has its roots in the philosophical domain. The philosophical perspective of Ontology is deeply theoretical and is mainly associated with the study of existence of entities, their relations with each other, grouping the entities, arranging them in a hierarchy, and chalking out their similarities and differences based on certain pre-determined parameters. This theoretical, age old concept has been practically applied in information science and technology in the form of Ontology Engineering. Ontology engineering is an important field of applied ontology. It can be enunciated as an application of philosophical ontology. Ontology Engineering, due to its very nature of dealing with concepts and relationships, can also be compared to conceptual modeling. Ontology engineering aims at providing a direction to solve the interoperability problems brought about by mismatches due to the semantics and the meanings of the concepts involved.

An ontology is a formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualization. Ontologies are normally related with logical inference to offer a common perceptive of a particular domain. They facilitate the domain to be connecting people, organization and application systems. In nutshell, ontologies communicated are a promising and robust tool to provide assistance to human-machine communication, to realize interoperability between software systems and to make the software systems more robust and resilient.

Ontology engineering, a key component of Web 3.0, is an upcoming field of research. Although the philosophical concept is age old, but the practically implemented field of ontology engineering is still an upcoming thing. The ontology development methodologies are still being devised and being researched upon. These development methodologies have not fully matured yet as the case with software engineering models. Since, software development field is a highly matured and developed field, and ontology also being a part of some software, it is a natural instinct to compare software development field with ontology engineering. The software development standards can be kept as yard sticks while evaluating ontology development methodologies. Although a significant number of ontology development methodologies are available, it is still unclear in the current literature how an existing ontology building methodology can be applied to develop semantic ontology models. There are some standard software development methodologies like IEEE1074-1995, ISO 9001:2008 etc. These are the standards for the generation of the process that governs software development and maintenance of the project. The IEEE standard begins with the selection of an appropriate software life cycle model. It does not define a particular life cycle model. The standard describes in detail the software development process, the activities to be carried out and the techniques that can be used for the development of the software. The activities are not presented in time order, since the standard recommends that they be incorporated into a software life cycle, which is selected and established by the user for the project under development. Various activities defined by this methodology include Project Management activities, Pre Development Activities, Development Activities, Post-Development Activities and Integral Activities. This standard serves as both a yard stick as well as a guiding road map to various personnel involved in the software development process like the software developers, project managers, quality assurance, organizers, purchasers, users and maintainers. It is useful where the software is developed in totality or as a standalone entity or is used as an embedded entity into a larger system(IEEE Standard for Developing Software Life Cycle Processes, 1997).

For modeling quality ontologies which are interoperable, reusable and repeatable, it is utmost important have to standard ontology development methodologies which have to be domain independent and generic. Some of the well-known ontology development methodologies are Cyc, TOVE, KAKTUS, METHONTOLOGY, on-to knowledge methodology, methodology by Ushold and King, methodology by Grüninger and Fox, etc.