Expert-Based Ontology Construction: A Case-Study in Horticulture

Experts are capable of performing complex tasks in their specific field of expertise. To do this, they use a vast amount of explicit and tacit domain knowledge. For various applications it may be interesting to represent such detailed domain knowledge in a formal way. We show here the process of elicitating expert knowledge and constructing a domain ontology for a case-study in which experts assess the quality of young greenhouse plants. We have interviewed sorting experts from different plant breeders, created individual ontologies, merged these ontologies, added relevant relations from an observer´s point of view and checked the results in a teach-back session. We draw two main conclusions from this work. The first conclusion is that the tacit part of an expert´s knowledge is often explicit knowledge for another expert. The resulting merged ontology is richer than the individual ontologies. The second conclusion is that it is essential to involve an objective observer in the creation of the ontology for adding relations to the ontology that are relevant for the final purpose of the ontology, but that are part of the tacit knowledge of the experts