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METHONTOLOGY [20] is a methodology, created in the Artificial Intelligence Lab from the
Technical University of Madrid (UPM), for building ontologies either from scratch, reusing other
ontologies as they are, or by a process of reengineering them. METHONTOLOGY is the precursor to the NEON methodology. It serves as a gateway methodology. The METHONTOLOGY framework enables the construction of ontologies at the knowledge level. It includes: the identification of the ontology development process, a life cycle based on evolving prototypes (shown in
Fig. 1), and particular techniques to carry out each activity. The
ontology development process
identifies which tasks should be performed when building ontologies (scheduling, control,
quality assurance, specification, knowledge acquisition, conceptualization, integration, formalization, implementation, evaluation, maintenance, documentation and configuration management). The
life cycle
identifies the stages through which the ontology passes during its lifetime,
as well as the interdependencies with the life cycle of other ontologies [19]. Finally, the methodology specifies the techniques used in each activity, the products that each activity outputs and
how they have to be evaluated. The main phase in the ontology development process using the
METHONTOLOGY approach is the conceptualization phase. Tools such as WebODE [1,12] and
ODE [5] provide support to METHONTOLOGY. However, other tools can be also used to
develop ontologies following this methodology.