Establishing Conceptual Commitments in the Development of Ontologies through Competency Questions and Conceptual Graphs

The process of establishing the ontology objectives by the stakeholders is fundamental for the ontology success. This process is unstructured by nature, being a continuum from the initial discussion of the purpose to the first agreed conceptual representation. The inherent (inter) subjectivity of the process and their outcomes together with an excessive informality are perhaps the reasons for being overlooked in the literature. This paper proposes an approach integrating competency questions (CQ) and conceptual graphs to the support of domain experts and knowledge specialists in defining the purpose and fundamental conceptual commitments of the ontology to be developed. The approach was experimented and validated with experts in a project in the chemical-pharmaceutical industry.