Innovation and Ontologies

Formalization 323
Formal Ontology
Characteristics of Elaboration Characteristics of Result
On the basis of the informal taxonomy, the formal
ontology is developed by researchers and provided
for feedback to domain experts.
The process of elaboration is driven by
methodological rules in order to reach a correct
ontological representation of idea assessment and
selection.
The formal ontology finely represents the central
elements of the domain. By use of relations other
than inheritance, it is able to represent more details
in a structured way.
Discussion and comparison of approaches is eased
by provision of a detailed, structured
representation. This representation is available in
graphical as well as textual version.
table 111 Summary of elaboration and result of second formalization
The second result, the formal ontology, is computable if realized in an ontology language, e.g.
OWL. By an OWL implementation, the data becomes understandable and processable to both,
humans and machines. Consequently, communication with other applications which require machinereadability
or automatic large-scale analysis and comparison of data would require an ontology
language version of the OntoGate.
For the development of the ontology in OWL the free, open source ontology editor Protégé 294 is
suggested. The definition of Protégé requires some changes in definition of relations. Below,
figure 123 shows an excerpt of the OWL code, representing a part of the class Internal_participant.
The third line indicates that Protégé defines relations as object property of a class, i.e.:
.