A Step Towards Context Insensitive Quality Control for Ontology Building Methodologies

A methodology provides description of process and guidance for producing ontology that facilitates management of the enterprise engineering products. Method support in terms of detailed guidelines is important to ensure the quality of ontologies. Then, it is also important to be able to evaluate the quality of such method guidelines. This paper proposes an analytical framework for such evaluations, achieved by combining Uschold’s unified methodology for ontology building with a semiotic framework for understanding quality in conceptual modelling. These two frameworks are shown to map well onto each other, and indicates a potential in applying the semiotic framework not merely in evaluation and choice of methodology for ontology building, but also in embodying quality throughout the process of ontology building.