1.1.2 Motivations for an Ontology Development Method

There is a global vision behind the idea of ontology development. Spearheaded by the

Knowledge Sharing Effort sponsored by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA),

ontologies are being constructed for a growing number of manufacturing, engineering, and

scientific domains. With such ontologies in place, the advantages noted above could be realized

on a global scale: standardized terminology with precise meanings that are fixed across

industries and across international borders, and the ability to access and reuse a huge number of

existing ontologies in the design and construction of new systems. Central products of this effort

include the Knowledge Interchange Format (KIF), a text-based logical language for the

interchange of knowledge, and Ontolingua, a mechanisms built on KIF for translating knowledge

between different representation languages. The IDEF5 method described in this report has been

designed with the Knowledge Sharing Effort and its vision closely in mind. Most notably, the

IDEF5 elaboration language (see Section 4.2) — the central medium for storing ontology

information collected via the IDEF5 method (see Section 3) — uses KIF as its foundation, and is

thus wholly compatible with the central tools of the Knowledge Sharing Effort. This is

particularly crucial as the concepts behind the effort become even more widely accepted and

implemented.

Another key motivation for an ontology development method is a pragmatic one. Previous

approaches to ontology have almost exclusively been academic in nature. Researchers from

varied fields such as Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy, Database Management, Mathematics,

and Cognitive Science have studied ontology from different perspectives. All previous

approaches have failed to produce a practical method for ontology acquisition. The IDEF5

7

method therefore fulfills an important need by providing a cost-effective mechanism to acquire,

store, and maintain scaleable and re-usable ontologies. The intended contribution of IDEF5 is a

method to guide and assist domain experts and knowledge engineers in the construction of both

small and large reusable ontologies. We have designed the IDEF5 technique to be usable by a

personnel at varying skill levels and from a variety of different kinds of organizations.

1.2 Benefits of Ontology Development

Ontology development provides several benefits to organized enterprises. The benefits of

ontology development can be grouped under two headings:

1) Benefits of developing the ontology: The process of ontological analysis is a

discovery process that leads to an enhanced understanding of a domain. The insights

of ontological analysis are useful for (i) identification of problems (diagnosis), (ii)

identification of the problem causes (causal analysis), (iii) identification of

alternative solutions (discovery and design), (iv) consensus and team building, and

(v) knowledge sharing and reuse.

2) Benefits derived from the products of ontology development: The ontologies that

result at the end of an ontology development effort can be used beneficially for (i)

information systems development: ontologies provide a blueprint for developing

more intelligent and integrated information systems, (ii) systems development:

ontologies can be used as reference models for planning, coordinating, and

controlling complex product/process development activities, (iii) business process reengineering:

ontologies provide clues to identifying focus areas for organizational

restructuring and suggest potential high-impact transition paths for restructuring.

Ontological analysis and development have been shown to be useful for: (i) Consensus building,

(ii) Object-oriented design and programming, (iii) Component based programming, (iv) User

interface design, (v) Enterprise information modeling, (vi) Business process reengineering, and

(vii) Conceptual schema design.