On the Effect of Ontologies on Web Application Development Effort

Ontologies play a key role in the Semantic Web the goal of which is to provide an environment able to advance quality of state-of-the-art web applications. Since we expect qualitative gains to come at the costs of increased development effort, we have decided to study the effect of an ontology on web application development effort. We have applied the WEBMO effort estimation model and discovered that for an average web application ontologies are expected to initially cause a manageable (around 10%) increase of development effort. In the long run, however, ontologies have a potential to significantly improve efficiency of the overall development process resulting in around 50% decrease of development effort.