Troubleshooting Collaborative Ontology Design

This paper presents observations from engineering ontology design sessions. We followed the entire design process of a group of engineers building an ontology for root cause analysis to be applied to petroleum pump failure diagnosis. The group was composed of experts with same background, who work in different locations of the same company. Even though they apparently share similar analysis methods, during meetings discrepancies emerged. Different points of view were argued and decisions were made at the end of each meeting. Given the final product acceptance problems, we look back at each meeting and attempt to identify the reasons that led to this unfortunate and common outcome. Understanding the problem enables us to draw a set of guidelines for empowering design meetings with simple technologic methods for improving group final artifact acceptance; therefore diminishing re-work. Our observations point towards (l) a correlation between designers' behavior and future artifact acceptance; (1) a set of actions that interrupts or brings back group attention; and (3) a metric for evaluating group design meetings. We believe our findings may guide software developers to tools for supporting group design.