A critical analysis of lifecycles and methods for ontology construction and evaluation

Evaluation is a crucial phase in ontological lifecycle, especially for ontologies that are produced using automated or semi-automated methods. In this paper, we focus on the evaluation phase in the frame of the ontology building process. We begin by a review of different ontology construction lifecycles. Next, we try to review state-of-the-art methods for ontology construction with a special interest on evaluation for assessing the quality of ontologies. Afterwards we highlight the main limits and difficulties of these methods with respect to evaluation. We conclude with a first sketch on how evaluation should be undertaken for guiding the development of high quality ontologies that are more relevant to the requirements of a particular domain.