Tools and Methods
To manage the size of this exercise we organize the content along two distinct and orthogonal axis; one is purely hierarchical allowing a breakdown into managable sized scopes, the other is a refinement across abstraction layers.
Organizational Dimensions
The organizational dimension separates the entire ontology into a set of domains, and each domain into a set of views.
Domains
A domain is best described as the set of concepts and entities necessarily described to understand one or more processes in an area of the business. As such the domain is often named for this area of the business or for one of these processes.
Views
A view is then centered on one or more of the entities within the domain and provides a specific slice of the overall model.
See Domains and Views.
Semantic Dimensions
The semantic, or abstraction, dimension simply separates one high-level view described using semantic maps (images) from our detailed formal ontology representations in RDF and OWL.
Concept Maps
The images are semantic maps using Cmap Tools suite, and provide a useful high-level way to capture the concepts used in our ontologies. The tools are light-weight and so are powerful for use in workshop environments capturing ideas in fast paced back and forth exchanges.
OWL Ontologies (Protégé)
The formal text is Turtle a serialization of the RDF, RDF Schema and OWL semantic web standards commonly used in the development of knowledge graphs and ontologies.
For the development of the OWL ontologies we use the excellent Protégé tool.
See Detailed: Protégé and OWL and OWL Guidelines.