We were working with a client recently who wanted to incorporate their existing taxonomies into their newly forming enterprise ontology. It was, as they say, a “teachable moment.” Not all taxonomies are created equal. At least not with regard to their being able to be integrated into an ontology. Most people start a taxonomy...Continue reading→

First, you need to know what the original objectives were for having the ontology. The more specific the objectives, the easier it is to test whether they have been met. If you never had any objectives (or requirements), it might be easier to declare success, but harder to defend what that means. Whatever the specific...Continue reading→

A good place to start is to run an inference engine to see if there an any logical inconsistencies or classes that cannot possibly have any members. The former is always an error; the latter usually leads to an error. However, this is only the beginning. Plenty of errors can remain even when the ontology...Continue reading→

This is a question of scope. An ontology is complete if it has all the concepts and axioms that are needed. Needed for what? This depends on the intended purpose of the ontology. If you have a local, one-time need to integrate a small number of databases, then you need to include all the concepts...Continue reading→

This is related both to scope and to design. An ontology is elegant if it has the fewest possible concepts to cover the required scope with minimal redundancy and complexity. Whereas completeness is about making sure enough is in the ontology, elegance is about making sure that the ontology is not done until there is...Continue reading→

This is a complex and multi-faceted issue. The answer depends on the audience, who have varying degrees of a) knowledge in the domain, b) technical background, c) awareness of what the ontology is for and d) need to directly work with the ontology. For everyone, and especially non-technical people, it is important for there to...Continue reading→

Great question. This is an ongoing challenge because different parts of a company use terms differently. One rule of thumb is to avoid using terms that have many different meanings across the company – this will just cause confusion. Things can be set up so that local groups can see their own terms in UIs...Continue reading→

I will answer this in the context of OWL ontologies where the errors are found using Hermit or Fact++ as the inference engine. I happen to use Protégé, but other ontology tools have similar functionality. There are a few cases. First, if the ontology is inconsistent, then one or more classes will be inferred to...Continue reading→

Yes. Check out http://oeg-lia3.dia.fi.upm.es/oops/. The authors looked through the literature and discovered 29 common pitfalls that arise when building ontologies. Code has been written to automatically find 21 of the 29 pitfalls. Try it out and give the authors feedback. The whole community will benefit.

Workers, professionals and managers are all becoming acutely aware of the discrepancy between the performance of consumer based technology and their internal IT department. The gap between the information and services they can get for ‘free’ on the web vs. what they get from IT is creating a high level of frustration and dissatisfaction between IT...Continue reading→