COLM - Corporate Ontology Lifecycle Methodology

Recent ontology engineering methodologies lack an adequate support for the economic-driven needs of companies and a context-dependent point of view. Corporate settings are characterized by a complex IT infrastructure, which provides various contents, such as documents or databases (domain context). Ontologies and the ontology engineering discipline should respect the agility of the evolving knowledge of this context.

Approach

COLM is based upon a two parts ontology lifecycle, which has been concluded from requirements that we derived from an analization of industrial needs. This lifecycle separates pure engineering from ontology usage and aspires a minimal effort of corporate human resources and a reduction of engineering tasks. The integrity of the rapidly released ontology prototypes is reached by an innovative tracking mechanism, which enables an automatic, implicit improvement of the conceptualization.