A Proposal for a Unified Process for Ontology Building: UPON

Ontologies are the backbone of the Semantic Web, a semantic-aware version of the World Wide Web. To the end of making available large-scale, high quality domain ontologies, effective and usable methodologies are needed to facilitate the process of Ontology Building. Many of the methods proposed so far only partly refer to well-known and widely used standards from other areas, like software engineering and knowledge representation. In this paper we present UPON, a methodology for ontology building derived from the Unified Software Development Process. A comparative evaluation with other methodologies, as well as the results of its adoption in the context of the Athena Integrated Project, are also discussed.