Research on Building Ocean Domain Ontology

A few research groups have proposed a series of methodologies for developing their own standard ontologies. However, due to the fact that ontological construction aims at special fields, there lacks systematic and engineering method to build domain ontology. In this paper, based on discussing and analyzing some representative ontology building methodologies, we propose a knowledge engineering approach to build domain ontology by combining software development life cycle standard IEEE 1074-2006 with design ontology criteria proposed by T. R. Gruber. Following this approach, we describe marine biology ontology development process with Hozo in detail. We verify the validity and rationality of marine biology ontology by applying it to a practical system called OASIS. We also describe our experience in the development of domain ontology and demonstrate the applicability of proposed knowledge engineering approach.