Collaborative Design of a Synchrotron Ontology

The paper presents an approach to collaborative analysis and design of the synchrotron ontology. The ontology building process requires the analysis of the subject of conceptualization, the definition of goals and tasks that ontology is to fulfill as well as the way of implementation of an ontology in the appropriate logic language. It often needs cooperation of many specialists: domain experts, analysts and engineers who implement the ontology. In this paper, the use of competency questions defined in cooperation with many specialists from different domains and usage of use cases to develop the synchrotron ontology, is presented. The competency questions are used to define the subject of conceptualization to be represented by the ontology, while collaborative analysis of requirements facilitates specification of use cases and implementation phases. The presented approach enables the cooperation of many engineers in defining ontology design patterns that could be reused in many domains. It is applied to build a prototype high level ontology that could be used to develop ontologies for specific synchrotrons.