Iterative process for designing ontologies based on quality metrics and competency questions.
What is it about?
The paper introduces a process for designing ontologies that will be used to set up knowledge bases. Thus, the process is driven by validation and verification metrics to ensure that the ontology aims are reached in terms of quality criteria for design quality and end-user usability, learnability and completeness. The paper explains this process in a real case study.
Why is it important?
Ontologies might be used for eliminating terms ambiguity, to create taxonomies with semantics or for setting knowledge bases that will be used to perform reasoning in case studies. The process in this paper is intended for the latter, and thus, it will help in building ontologies to create knowledge bases (KBs) that will be used by information systems. These KBs might also be used for encoding business rules as knowledge inference rules, then the designing quality is important for preventing unexpected situations in reasoning. The ontology validation is also important from the end-user perspective since they will be the KBs users. Then, the process proposed in the paper is closely and iterative driven by verification and validation of the ontology against competency questions and metrics.