TOWARD PRINCIPLES FOR THE DESIGN OF ONTOLOGIES USED FOR KNOWLEDGE SHARING

Recent work in Artificial Intelligence (AI) is exploring the use of fo rmal ontologies as a way of specifying content-specific agreements for the sharing and reuse of knowledge among software entities. We take a n engineering perspective on the development of such ontologies. Forma l ontologies are viewed as designed artifacts, formulated for specific purposes and evaluated against objective design criteria. We describe the role of ontologies in supporting knowledge sharing activities, an d then present a set of criteria to guide the development of ontologie s for these purposes. We show how these criteria are applied in case s tudies from the design of ontologies for engineering mathematics and b ibliographic data. Selected design decisions are discussed, and altern ative representation choices are evaluated against the design criteria . (C) 1995 Academic Press Limited