“Onto-Computer-Project”, a Computer Project Domain Ontology : Construction and Validation

Ontologies, nowadays, play a primordial role in the representation, the re-use and the sharing of knowledge of a well given domain in a consensual and explicit way more precisely in the computing field. It is in this context that we have proposed a domain ontology baptised onto-computer-project which presents the key to our research goal. This essential goal is to arrive at a final step to elaborate a knowledge based system for computer projects reusing. The aimed system is essentially based on the construction of a memory projects. This memory projects could be defined as a collection of historical and achieved projects around the sphere of computer. This sphere is so wide including many subfields beginning at the database, software engineering fields and arriving at the fields of artificial intelligence, computer vision and so on. This research work requires at first to construct a well-defined ontology in the way to structure and to unify vocabulary often shared by multi actors in the domain of computer projects. To concretize this goal, our paper will describe a construction approach for the proposed domain ontology which is mainly based on an existing methodology named “methontology”. The proposed ontology construction approach, which is composed of seven steps, is the result of a comparative study between some ontology construction approaches belonging to different categories of methodology. In fact, we can distinguish four main categories of ontology development approaches: ontology construction approaches from zero, text-based construction approaches, building approaches based on the reuse of already existing ontologies, and crowd souring-based approaches. In our research work, we are interested by the approach of building ontology from zero. Indeed, the construction of the proposed ontology follows an autonomous approach which is not based on any other existing ontology or the updating of an already constructed ontology. In addition, in this paper we are interested by the problem of validating the content of domain ontology and in this context we have proposed an incremental approach for validating the proposed ontology which is composed of six steps. In this context we have studied some ontology validation approaches: those which are questionnaire based, others based on question answering. The problem here that all approaches studied are single actor approaches where a single validation actor can validate the entire ontology and this by applying the semantic and the structural validation definitively with no return. The main originality of our validation approach consists essentially of three criteria: the incremental validation, the multi-intervention, and the respecting of the “V” cycle. In fact, the passage from one validation step to another results in an update of the initial ontology and this by the intervention of three experts (project management expert, a project computer expert and a specialist in ontology engineering). Our proposal approach requires a feedback between all the validation phases and can return to any expert for revalidation if needed. The result of this research is improved a validated ontology which is allowed us to build our project memory and to feed our knowledge base which will serve us to develop our knowledge-based system.