An ontology development methodology to integrate existing ontologies in an ontology development process

Ontology is defmed as an explicit specification of a conceptualization while a conceptualization is an abstract, simplified view of the world that we wish to represent for some purpose. To build high quality ontologies, developers are required to choose and follow a suitable ontology development methodology in which containing a series of steps, activities and guidelines that are put together in an organized and systematic manner. Literatures show that building ontologies by reusing existing ontologies is more cost effective than building from scratch. However, majority of the methodologies only provide a very limited discussion about how to perform integration or ontology reused in their ontology development processes. This paper aims to develop a set of guidelines for the selection of ontology reuse methods which has not been explored in any ontology research. In addition, an ontology development methodology that incorporates ontology reuse methods and a system that can assist to perform integration semi-automatically is proposed. An application scenario has been developed to illustrate how the proposed development methodology can be adopted to create an ontology.