Applying the Unified Process to Large-Scale Ontology Building

Ontologies are the backbone of the Semantic Web, a semantic-aware version of the World Wide Web. To the end of making available large-scale domain ontologies, effective and usable methodologies are needed to facilitate the process of Ontology Building. Many of the methods proposed so far only in part refer to well-known and widely used standards from other areas, like software engineering and knowledge representation. In this paper we present UPON, a methodology based on the adaptation to Ontology Building of the Unified Software Development Process developed by the Object Management Group. The approach provides interesting insights from both software engineering and ontology construction. A comparative evaluation with other methodologies, as well as the results of its adoption in the context of the European Interop Network of Excellence and Athena Integrated Project, are also discussed.