Functional ontology artifacts: Existent and emergent knowledge

Ontologies have primarily been promoted to facilitate interagent communication and knowledge reuse. There has not been as much emphasis on using ontologies to improve system quality. As a result, typically, ontology development, and verification and validation are treated as different stages in the life cycle. However, this paper argues that ontology design should include emergent knowledge that previously might only have been considered or generated at the time of verification and validation. Emergent knowledge differs from the existent knowledge that is typically included in ontologies. Existent variable knowledge is knowledge about variables that derives from the model of the variable being used, e.g., how is a conceptual variable measured. Emergent variable knowledge is knowledge about variables that emerges after variables have been named, e.g., cardinality, which variables interact with each other and how, e.g., independent and dependent variables. Much emergent knowledge can be used for verification and validation. Including emergent knowledge can facilitate the use of ontologies to design and to build systems with fewer anomalies prior to testing. 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.