TEMPPLET: A new method for domain-specific ontology design

Ontology is becoming a basic and important issue for knowledge management and semantic web applications. However, domain-specific ontology design is always difficult. On one hand, the ontology has to fit into standards in the domain to ensure interoperability; On the other hand, it has to be applied into individual organizations. To solve the problem, in this paper we provide a new method for domain-specific ontology design - "Tempplet", combining two words "template" and "applet" together. The two steps of the method are: Firstly it follows a "template ontology" of the domain; then fitting "applet ontology" into the chosen template when customizing. Moreover, a formal model is provided to answer whether there exists an applet ontology that both satisfies the constraints and conforms to the template ontology. Two cases of ontology design for different domains are given to illustrate how to apply the method into practice.