ROD - toward rapid ontology development for underdeveloped domains

Ontology is a crucial component in knowledge management and organizational learning. Despite the widespread ontology-related research and applications, developing domain ontologies remains a challenging issue. Ontology development for underdeveloped domains, which have no structural resources in existence, becomes even more difficult and time-consuming. In this paper, we propose a rapid ontology development (ROD) methodology that can be used to build ontology for underdeveloped domains. It consists of four processes: domain analysis, document and language processing, statistical analysis and extraction, and collaborative mapping. On the one hand, ROD intends to make the development process more efficient so that domain concepts and relations can be automatically discovered from large-scale semi-structured and/or unstructured textual resources. On the other hand, it requires domain experts´ involvement as is heeded with the assistance of a customizable collaborative system. The approach has been assessed using community development domain. In addition to the expected results, we have also made some hew observations from the experiment. We believe that ROD can also be applied to established domains.