Towards an User-Friendly Ontology Design Methodology

Ontologies are a basic building block for enterprise interoperability services. As of today ontologies are created by highly specialized ontology engineers. In order to utilize the full knowledge available in modern organizations new approaches to ontology creation are necessary to bridge the "ontology gap" and enable domain experts to create formalized knowledge. In our work we reviewed existing methodologies for ontology creation and accessed their suitability for usage by novice users and domain experts. We analyzed and structured their major characteristics to provide a unified view. From there on we formulated criteria for the success of an ontology creation methodology for domain experts and empirically evaluated them in cooperation with practitioners from both industry and academia.