Title "Ontology Development 101: A Guide to Creating Your First Ontology"

Authors Nataly F. Noy, Deborah L. McGuinness

Reference
Stanford Knowledge Systems Laboratory Technical Report KSL-01-05 and Stanford Medical Informatics Technical Report SMI-2001-0880

Year 2001

URL http://ksl.stanford.edu/people/dlm/papers/ontology-tutorial-noy-mcguinness-abstract.html

My Summary
The paper starts by describing the reason why someone should develop an ontology and also what an ontology mainly is. It continues with an illustration of a simple methodology for developing an ontology, starting with determining the domain and scope of the ontology, and going all the way to the creation of classes, properties, instances. More importantly, it does not stop here, on the contrary, it explains how to handle different situations like when to introduce a new class, should it be a new class or a property value, should it be an instance or a class. All this is detailed with an example of a wine ontology to better grasp what it is presented in the paper.

Methods
For developing the ontology, the authors have used Protege-2000 as an ontology-developing environment. Some of the figures were generated with the OntoViz plugin to Protege-2000.

Systems Integration Relevance
Product requirements and Components semantics are represented with ontologies, thus providing semantic descriptions which can be processed for consistency and model synthesis, which involves machine reasoning and inference.

Keywords
Ontology, Protege, top-down development , bottom-up development, wine taxonomy, class, instance, property value