Collaborative Ontological Design of a Web Portal

The paper describes the collaborative development of an ontology for designing a web portal as part of a system development life cycle. Starting with the problem statement of the sponsors, the paper discusses the induction of the ontology from the requirements and the articulation of the ontology in wire frames for the system. Subsequently, the paper describes the multiple methods of external and internal validation of the ontology. The paper concludes with a discussion of future application of the ontology and recommendations for improvement. Thus it highlights the value of combining ontological analysis with the system development lifecycle (SDLC), conceptual modeling, and collaboration engineering.