METHONTOLOGY: From Ontological Art Towards Ontological Engineering

This paper does not pretend either to transform completely the ontological art in engineering or to enumerate exhaustively the complete set of works that has been reported in this area. Its goal is to clarify to readers interested in building ontologies from scratch, the activities they should perform and in which order, as well as the set of techniques to be used in each phase of the methodology. This paper only presents a set of activities that conform the ontology development process, a life cycle to build ontologies based in evolving prototypes, and METHONTOLOGY, a well-structured methodology used to build ontologies from scratch. This paper gathers the experience of the authors on building an ontology in the domain of chemicals. 1