If you’ve ever been involved in building an ontology it’s likely you’ve come away from the process with a few battle scars. Projects to develop a common vocabulary in an organization are time consuming and political because it’s difficult to get everyone to agree on a single consistent term for each concept. And while we all agree it’s good to have a consistent language, pointing to a specific business benefit that makes your CFO smile is hard.
A good way to approach ontology development is to use tools, technology and processes that support the process. You’ll want a feature rich ontology management tool that incorporates Semantic Web standards so you can you drive information exchange, leverage open linked data and increase interoperability in the ontology building process.
Using an ontology management tool that’s easy to use and collaborative can streamline the model building process. And those painful conversations to gain consensus for each concept and term can be eliminated if the tool supports contextual synonyms and relationships that address the differences in term definitions across the enterprise so that all users are satisfied.
The Semantic Web provides a common standards based framework that allow data to be shared and reused across department, enterprise and community boundaries. These standards promote common data formats and exchange protocols so that organizations can share information and incorporate internal as well as external models into their organization.
Incorporating these standard models lets you jump-start the ontology development process. You can begin with a public ontology and customize it to reflect the unique concepts and terms associated with your organization and business domain. By linking to public domain models you can include the information you need and at the same time data remains independent, individual taxonomies live where they’re developed and model integrity remains intact.
And let’s face it you don’t have to model the whole organization at once – you can use an agile process starting with one part and build sideways. Once you’ve identified a problem, you model the problem domain; if your problem is adverse event reporting in Pharma, you look at drugs, side effects and dosages. Once you’ve solved one business problem you’re ready to tackle another and when you’re done you can link them together if appropriate.
Smartlogic’s Content Intelligence platform addresses these issues. With Semaphore 4 Ontology Editor you get:
With these features you can quickly build your model, create rulesets and begin classifying your content and improve the delivery process that allows you to harmonize your data, drive workflows, secure sensitive content, improve search and retrieval, and archive, migrate and monetize your information.
- A web-based ontology management interface that supports user collaboration. Models can be accessed anytime from anywhere. Multiple models can be worked on at the same time and what-if modeling can be performed.
- Ontology mapping and linked open data that leverages internal as well as public domain models.
- Native Semantic Web support.
- Task centric model development to drive workflow & life-cycle management.
Building an ontology doesn’t have to be painful, using the right tools, technology and processes can lessen the pain and maybe make your CFO smile.
