METHONTOLOGY

Presented by : Dikesh Kumar Shrestha

Roll no: 02

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contents
• Introduction
• METHONTOLOGY Framework
• Classification of METHONTOLOGY development process or activities
• Specification
• Conceptualization
• Formulation and Implementation
• Evaluation
• Technical Evaluation
• Case Analysis evaluation
• Documentation
• Drawbacks of METHONTOLOGY

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Introduction:
• METHONTOLOGY- Methods+ontology
• METHONTOLOGY is a clearly-defined and well-structured methodology used in
ontology development from the scratch.
• METHONTOLOGY was originally derived from the experience of developing Chemical
Ontology at Polytechnic University of Madrid (Fernández-López et al., 1999).
• It is most popular methodology …….why?
1. because of its domain-independent characteristics so, ontologiest don’t
need to know the ontology’s implementation language. (Translator->OWL-DL)
2. provides a user-friendly approach to knowledge acquisition by
non-knowledge engineers
3. can reduce ontology development time and increase the possibility of the project
success.
• METHONTOLOGY proposes expressing the idea as a set of intermediate representations
and uses translators to generate the ontology.
• It proposes that evaluation occurs throughout ontology development process.

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METHONTOLOGY Framework
• the identification of the ontology development process(which activities)
• Management
• Development
• Support
• a life cycle based on evolving prototypes(order of activities)
• the methodology itself, which specifies the steps for performing each activity, the
techniques used, the products to be output, and how the ontologies are to be
evaluated.
• Specification
• Knowledge acquisition
• Conceptualization
• Integration
• implementation
• Evaluation
• Documentation

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Classification of METHONTOLOGY development
process or activities
• In 2004 it was expanded and classified into three broad process where each process contains
specific activities.

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Specification
• Where the domain and the scope of ontology are identified which includes
• Purpose of ontology
• the intended users
• To obtain ontology specification document, several sub-activities carried away
i.e.
• Domain analysis- GSO(graduation screening process) of the largest university in korea . The ultimate
purpose of GSO is to determine whether students can graduate and to inform which requirements need
to be fulfilled according to their graduation requirements.

• Search for existing ontologies- got no such existing ontologies but found an educational portal which
covers like GPA, course credit hours, and the list of courses the student has taken or is currently enrolled
in but had not provided information about graduation requirements

• Knowledge acquisition-acquired most of the knowledge during conceptualization. Information was

obtained from interviews with persons-in-charge and various sources such as the university Websites,
administration offices, libraries, and so on.

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Conceptualization
• This activities converts informal data into semi-formal specification
using a set of intermediate representation(IRs) based on tabular and
graph notation provided by METHONTOLOGY.
• IRs( it includes concepts, attributes, relations, axioms and rules) are
valuable because they are easily understood by both domain experts
and ontology developer.
• IRs bridged the gap between people's domain perception and
ontology implementation.

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 Continue…….
• Corcho et al. (2005) suggested eleven specific tasks during the
conceptualization stage to develop a conceptual ontology as shown in Figure

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Formulation and implementation
• IRs developed for GSO during the conceptualization were finally formalized
and implemented.
• used Protégé- OWL to convert our formal model into an OWL-DL.
• GSO consists of seven classes: Course, Credit,Enrollment,
FinalTest_Or_Thesis, Grade_Point_ Average, Graduation_Requirement, and
Student.
• In GSO, annotation property and the cardinality restriction used to
represent numeric expression because OWL-DL does not provide any
method to represent numbers. So what they did?
• Each subclass of the class Grade_Point_Average was represented by defining letters
such as GPA_Aplus, GPA_Aplus GPA_AZero, and GPA_AMinus instead of 4.3, 4.0, 3.8,
etc.

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(Continue) formulation and implementation

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Evaluation
• Means to carryout a technical judgement of the ontologies, their
software environment and documentation with respect to a frame of
reference during each phase and life cycle.
• Ontologies should be evaluated before they are use or reused.
• Evaluation is classified as
• Verification- the technical process that guarantees the correctness of an ontology.
• Validation- weather the ontology really represent the real world.
• Assessment- focuses on judging the ontology from the users point of view.
• There are two kind of ontology evaluation
• Technical evaluation(verification and validation)
• Case Analysis Evaluation (Assessment)

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Technical evaluation
• performed by developers.
• The criteria of the technical evaluation are consistency, completeness
and conciseness
• In the case of GSO
• checked whether all individual concepts were consistent and ensured no contradictory
concepts could be inferred from other concepts and axioms.
• ascertained the classification hierarchy and disjoint knowledge to compute
completeness.
• checked unnecessary concepts and explicit redundancies between concepts to verify the
conciseness of GSO.

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Case Analysis Evaluation (Assessment)

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Documentation
• There are not consensuated guidelines on how to document ontologis
• In many cases, the only documentation available is in
• The code of ontology
• The natural language text attached to formal definitions, and
• Paper published in conference proceedings and journals.
• There are no standard methodologies to build ontologies due to untologiest do
not write, during the whole ontology development process.
• METHONTOLOGY pretends to break the circle including the documentation as an
activity to be done during the while ontology development process. In facts,
after the specification phase, you set a requirements specification documents.
• after knowledge acquisition phase-> knowledge acquisition document
• After conceptualization -> a conceptualization model documents- include a set of intermediate
representations that describe the application domain
• After formalization -> a formalization model documents
• After integrator -> a integrator model documentation

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Drawbacks of METHONTOLOGY
• METHONTOLOGY does not provide specific guidelines for assigning individual developers to
certain tasks.
• Even though METHONTOLOGY could be fully understood by a domain expert, it is not easy to
develop an ontology by the domain expert alone without help from an ontology specialist
• the IRs developed during the conceptualization phase are sometimes not seamlessly codified into
an ontology language. This can cause delays during the formalization and implementation stages.
• METHONTOLOGY does not provide sufficient explanations about methods and techniques applied
in each stage, relations among concepts.
• METHONTOLOGY allows continuous knowledge acquisition while working on ontology
development process
• even though METHONTOLOGY emphasizes the role of evaluation which is a part of support
process, it fails to provide specific validation and verification method for user evaluation.
• METHONTOLOGY asks developers to fill out many which are not always necessary.

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Reference

• Jinsoo Park, Kimoon Sung, Sewon Moon College of Business

Administration, Seoul National University, Developing Graduation
Screen Ontology based on the METHONTOLOGY Approach
• Mariano Fernindez Lopez, Asuncion Gomez-Perez, and Juan Pazos
Sierra, Polytechnic University of Madrid Alejandro Pazos Sierra,
University of Coruiia Building a Chemicul Ontology Using
MeMmontology and he Onfdogy Design Envhvnment

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