HOD2MLC: Hybrid Ontology Design and Development Model with Lifecycle

Ontologies have gained increasing usage to augment an application with domain knowledge, particularly in healthcare, where they represent knowledge ranging from: bioinformatics data such as protein, gene, etc. to biomedical informatics such as diseases, diagnosis, symptoms, etc. However, the current ontology development efforts and process are data intensive and construction based, creating ontologies for specific applications/requirements, rather than designing an abstract ontological solution(s) that can be reusable across the domain using a well-defined design process. To address this deficiency, the work presented herein positions ontologies as software engineering artifact that allows them to be placed into the position to share the captured domain conceptualization and its vocabulary involving disparate domain backgrounds, that can then be created, imported, exported and re-used using different frameworks, tools and techniques. Towards this end, the authors propose an agile software process for ontologies referred to as the Hybrid Ontology Design & Development Model with Lifecycle,HOD2MLC. To place HOD2MLC into a proper perspective, they explore, compare, and contrast it to existing ontology design and development alternatives with respect their various phases as related to the authors' work and phases in varied SDP models.