The State of the Art in Ontology Design

In this article, we develop a framework for comparing ontologies and place a number of the more prominent ontologies into it. We have selected 10 specific projects for this study, including general ontologies, domain-specific ones, and one knowledge representation system. The comparison framework includes general characteristics, such as the purpose of an ontology, its coverage (general or domain specific), its size, and the formalism used. It also includes the design process used in creating an ontology and the methods used to evaluate it. Characteristics that describe the content of an ontology include taxonomic organization, types of concept covered, top-level divisions, internal structure of concepts, representation of part-whole relations, and the presence and nature of additional axioms.