7. Summary

We have presented a new approach towards domain ontology creation. The introduced framework provides a generic, reusable methodology, which can be reapplied to create domain ontologies in various fields of interest. The prototype project which has been presented in this paper showed the applicability of the methods in the biosecurity domain. We introduced a generic layered ontology modelling approach that can be used to describe any possible domain of interest. Multilingual aspects have been addressed to solve the problems of portability, usage and representation of semantic knowledge in different languages. The overall framework, we described in section 4 and 5, provides a comprehensive methodology for domain ontology creation and is not bound to any domain specific input. Used thesauri, document sets and core ontologies can easily be replaced by equivalents from other domains. Moreover, as the open source applications are all Java-based, the used toolset providing the semiautomatic support is extremely adaptable to different needs. Obviously, the whole approach is completely portable and reusable in other domains.

We concluded our presentation, giving an outlook on further work to be done in the field of domain ontology usage. Example scenarios and applications have been addressed, giving an outlook on possible implementations of the Semantic Web: The initial motivation for building ontologies.

Acknowledgements: This project has been done in close collaboration with the AIFB^[13] institute of the University of Karlsruhe (TH) in Germany. All tool supported steps have been carried out, using the freely available KAON environment, developed at this institute. We would like to express our gratitude to the KAON group (KAON) for their technical expertise in this subject. We particularly thank Raphael Volz for his sound direction, technical guidance and supervision throughout the project. We also gratefully recognize the programming support of Boris Motik, which facilitated the adaptation of the tool set.