Welcome to the Scientific Ontology Network. Ontologies have become a central component of modern knowledge representation systems such as knowledge graphs. The developmen of ontologies has been an organic process in many communites. While these processes are commendable, the heterogenous nature of the resulting ontologies in structure hinders interoperability across domains.

Our goal is the proliferation of open, interoperable ontologies by defining open development standards and connecting ontology experts across domains.

Development Guidelines

Ontology development is hard. Contrary to many beliefs, it is not just the extraction, aggregation and formalisation of existing knowledge¹. Scientific domains are inherently heterogeneous with various terminologies and taxonomies across different communities. The mere extraction of these views will result in an ontology that reflects these opposing views without resolving them. Instead, good ontologies aim to reconcile these opposing conceptualisations into a mutually agreed-upon consensus. But this process requires an intricate, open development process that can be complex to design.

Therefore, we decided to compile our years of experience in ontology development in order to develop a new guide for ontology development. The purpose of this guide is to function as a first stop for new ontology developers that does not delve as deep into the formal and philosophical background as other works do.

Get the Guide

How to cite

@misc{son-ontology-guide,
  title = {A Practical Ontology Development Guide},
  author = {Martin Glauer, Markus Schilling, Mirjam Stappel},
  note  =  {\url{ https://github.com/scientific-ontology-network/ontology-development-guide/releases/download/v0.1.0/ontology-guide.pdf }},
}