Some ontology engineering processes and their supporting technologies

We describe the ontology engineering processes and their supporting technologies at L&C, a company developing intelligent medical applications based on ontologies. We describe the principal tasks that the modellers of our ontology have to execute, how they are supported and guided by some specifically ontology-focused management practices, and how (semi-)automated technology can also aid in their support and guidance, so as to produce a higher quality and quantity of ontology product. The ontology processes include the development of new structures of concepts and relations, the integration of other ontologies and terminologies, the integration of the ontology to natural language applications, and the reforming of the current ontology’s formal structure. The automated supports we talk about include OntoClean, a principled methodology for analyzing ontological properties and their constraints. We finally note how far we think our ontology technology comes to some proposed desiderata recently given for “enterprise standard” ontology environments.