Masterclass: Taxonomy-Driven Ontology Design
1h 33m
Taxonomies should not be looked at merely as the extension of ontologies downward into subclasses and individuals; taxonomies can also serve as a source of creating ontologies upward. Ontologies are best designed with a combination of top-down and bottom-up approaches. Top-down involves designating classes and then relations, based on such sources as stakeholder interviews, brainstorming workshops, and use case development, along with a survey of existing data/content management systems to identify their information organization schemes and metadata properties. Bottom-up methods help to identify all the ontology properties, both relations and attributes, which would involve examining metadata properties and elements and examining existing taxonomies, The inclusion of existing taxonomies can help define the ontology scope, and relations between classes can more easily be defined with existing concepts in each concept scheme/class. The ontology is then based on actual entities and is based less on hypothetical uses. Increasingly, organizations already have existing taxonomies, which should be leveraged rather than duplicated or replaced.