What Can Ontologists Learn from Knowledge Management?

At present the development of ontologies is very much an art rather than a science. With the lack of consensual guidelines, or generic process model for ontology engineering (OE) methodologies, each development team follows its own set of principles, design criteria and stages. This situation hinders the development of shared understanding within and between teams, the extension of a given ontology by others and its reuse in other ontologies and final applications. In fact, several authors have indicated that the source of many problems challenging ontologists is the lack of such a model. To address this issue ontology engineering process model is proposed based on the premise that ontology development is a special case of Nonaka's knowledge creation model. According to the proposed model, ontology engineering process is viewed as spiraling process in which the continuous and dynamic interaction between tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge of ontology's stakeholders plays a crucial role.