Creation of architectural ontology: user´s experience

Ontologies have been proved to play an important role in capturing domain knowledge in a computer-readable form to enable its further exploitation, sharing and reuse. Many methodologies and methodology-guided tools, such as ontology editors Protege-2000 and Apollo, were introduced to support the ontology design process. However, using these tools requires special expertise, which skilled knowledge model builders possess, but domain experts often don´t. This paper aims at showing where the drawbacks of ontology editors are in their aspiration to provide a direct ontology development support to the users whose background is not computer science. Our arguments are illustrated using real-life examples taken from the architectural ontology creation task with the focus on historical monuments.