Not Available

As ever more of industry and commerce moves onto electronic networks, there is a growing appreciation for the usefulness of expressive general models of enterprise activities, such as design and manufacturing. Ontologies are commitments to formal declarative multi-purpose representations with clear semantics that can serve as a solid foundation for such models. While there has been much work on representation languages, and on tools for creating, browsing, editing, and translating expressions in such languages, there has been relatively little attention to supporting the larger process of figuring out what ought to be encoded in an ontology. Some existing tools support collaborative teams, but by and large they seem to assume that all team members will be AI experts and that the work will focus on generation and manipulation of formal expressions. In this project, we propose to develop a complete prototype of a Domain Expert Collaborative Ontology Development environment (DECODE) that ensures those who best understand the domain, but least understand the technology of ontology, can make necessary contributions to the development process. DECODE will support development of ontologies in the context of solving systems integration problems; this systems integrations payoff will help to motivate investment in ontology development.