C-DOM: A structured co-design framework methodology for ontology design and development

The development of ontologies is traditionally a process of building vocabularies and understanding complexities of a specific domain to link data and infer knowledge. However, this method does not always include the domain experts throughout the entire development process. This paper presents a Co-design framework as a structured methodology for ontology design and development. The framework, known as the Co-Designing Ontologies Methodology (C-DOM), presents a strategy to draw knowledge from the Subject Matter Expert (SME) without the SME needing to know any-thing about how to create an ontology. The C-DOM framework outlines a series of workshops that align to the layers of the Semantic Technologies architecture and has been developed via an iterative design process and tested in different domains with different levels of complexity and purpose. The first iteration focused on the creation of a light-weight ontology to link generic data in the incident and accident. The next iteration built a heavyweight ontology that included complex inference and reasoning within the urban water management domain. This paper describes the C-DOM in detail for re-use within the Semantic Technologies community and outlines its iterative development process undertake.