Ontology Engineering in Yorùbá Cultural Heritage Domain

In this paper, we describe an engineering process of building an ontology for Yorùbá Cultural Heritage (YCH). The aim of this work is to design and implement an ontology representing knowledge embedded in YCH as a digital (documentation) resource. Building an indigenous knowledge management system requires a formal representation of YCH concepts and their relationships. Even so, YCH resources are endangered in the face of globalisation, westernisation and inter-ethnic interaction with the available few locked up in memory institutions. A combination of observation, consultation, documented materials and prototyping was used for the knowledge elicitation from domain experts. Formal Concept Analysis approach was adopted for the design aspect of the work. And, Protégé was used for the implementation. The resulting ontology was jointly validated with both the domain experts and the ontology experts. The final ontology represents the documentation of the elicited knowledge of the YCH domain. In conclusion, the formal digital documentation resulting from the study is a useful software artefact for the development of a semantic application for Yorùbá heritage domain.