AN ARCHITECTURE FRAMEWORK FOR ONTOLOGY DEVELOPMENT AND DEPLOYMENT

This paper identifies requirements for an ontology development platform to facilitate methodical ontology engineering and ontology application development. It introduces the DOGMA ontology framework, developed with insights from semantic modeling and methodology in database engineering, at STARLab, VUB. It has been adopted for ontology modeling and the development of ontology facilities in such EU R&T projects as NAMIC, ONTOWEB, FF POIROT. Based on this framework, an architectural paradigm is put forward in view of ontology engineering and development of ontology applications and a development portal designed to support ontology engineering, content authoring and application development with a view to maximal scalability in size and complexity of semantic knowledge and flexible reuse of ontology models and ontology application processes in a distributed and collaborative engineering environment