Development Approach for e-Science Ontology: A Case Study in Biological Domain

This paper describes QDA ontology - Quality Driven Approach for e-Science Ontologies, composed of stages, activities, participants, artifacts and quality criteria. The development process is centered in an evolutionary model, therefore, cycles can be repeated at each ontology evolution. The proposal approach is illustrated with artifacts from Cell Component Ontology (CelO) construction process. This ontology captures both structure of a cell model and properties of functional components. We use this ontology in a Web project (CelOWS) to describe, query and compose CellML models, using semantic web services. For e-Science applications, integration with other ontologies is always a main goal to guarantee interoperability and semantic exchange, and the proposal highlights this step, as well as documentation and quality evaluation.