The Adoption of 4Step-Rule-Set Method for Ontological Design: Application in a Real Industrial Project

Ontology building can greatly influence the development cycle of an information system and enhance interoperability among its constituent elements. Throughout the projects we have been developing we have detected, by studying the current literature, a need to develop an agile method to conceive and mapping ontologies, which allows a quick and effective response to R&D projects. Designing a method for building an ontology, which is integrated and aligned with a systematic development approach, represents a crucial challenge in new approaches to system design and exploitation. Extant proposed methods for building an ontology, especially following agile approaches, have achieved interesting results but lack integration and alignment with a wider-view development framework. Thus, we have defined the first version of a semantic model allowing the alignment with the previously defined information model. Following the best practices for ontology building and based on our previous work on software system development, we now propose a method for designing an ontology, the 4SRS Method for Ontological Design based on the V-Model 4SRS, aligning it with a proven development method. We further demonstrate this approach by applying the proposed method in a real case, to develop an ontology for a choen restricted scope within the domain problem.