Best Practices of Ontology Development (NIST White Paper)

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has sanctioned languages for ontology formulation, of which the most important is the Web Ontology Language (OWL). These have spawned in their turn powerful open-source software for developing and reasoning with ontologies and for querying data stores aligned to ontologies. Unfortunately, the resultant popularity of semantic technology has itself led to a situation where ontologies are now being created in heterogeneous, uncoordinated ways, thereby leading to a new problem of semantic stovepipes, and thus to a new failure of data integration and reuse. The best practices here described counteract this tendency by providing a set of principles and rules to lead to the development of ontologies in a consistent, non-redundant fashion.