Overview and analysis of methodologies for building ontologies

The use of methodologies in software and knowledge engineering is very extensive due to their important advantages. In the case of the development of ontologies, until now, several methodological proposals have been presented for building ontologies. Some of these methodologies are designed for building ontologies from scratch or reusing other ontologies without modifying them, concretely, the following cases can be mentioned: the Cyc methodology, the approach proposed by Uschold and King, Gruninger and Fox's methodology, the KACTUS methodology, METHONTOLOGY and the SENSUS methodology. There is even a proposal for re-engineering ontologies, and several proposals for collaborative construction of ontologies. In this article, we describe the methodologies and check their degree of maturity, contrasting them with respect to the IEEE standard for software development. Before this, we justify to what extent this standard can be used. A conclusion to this study is that there is no completely mature methodological proposal for building ontologies, since there are some important activities and techniques that are missing in all these methodologies. However, all the methodologies do not have the same degree of maturity. In fact, METHONTOLOGY is a very mature methodology. The other conclusion of this article is that, although work to unify proposals can be interesting, maybe several approaches should coexist.