Overcoming the Pitfalls of Ontology Authoring: Strategies and Implications for Tool Design

The process of authoring ontologies appears to be fragmented across several tools and workarounds, and there exists no well accepted framework for common authoring tasks such as exploring ontologies, comparing versions, debugging, and testing. This lack of an adequate and seamless tool chain potentially hinders the broad uptake of ontologies, especially OWL, as a knowledge representation formalism. We start to address this situation by presenting insights from an interview-based study with 15 ontology experts. We uncover the tensions that may emerge between ontology authors including antagonistic ontology building styles (definition-driven vs. manually crafted hierarchies). We identify the problems reported by the ontology authors and the strategies they employ to solve them. These data are mapped to a set of key design recommendations, which should inform and guide future efforts for improving ontology authoring tool support, thus opening up ontology authoring to a new generation of users. We discuss future research avenues in light of these results.