Ontology Engineering has captured much attention during the last decades leading to the proliferation of numerous works regarding methodologies, guidelines, tools, resources, etc. including topics which are still being investigated. Even though, there are still many open questions when addressing a new ontology development project, regarding how to manage the overall project and articulate transitions between activities or which tasks and tools are recommended for each step. In this work we propose the Linked Open Terms (LOT) methodology, an overall and lightweight methodology for building ontologies based on existing methodologies and oriented to semantic web developments and technologies. The LOT methodology focuses on the alignment with industrial development, in addition to academic and research projects, and software development, that is making ontology development part of the software industry. This methodology includes lessons learnt from more than 20 years in ontological engineering and its application on 18 projects is reported.

The following topics are dealt with: Internet of Things; wireless sensor networks; mobile computing; learning (artificial intelligence); autonomous aerial vehicles; protocols; computer network security; data privacy; data analysis; telecommunication traffic.

Ontological requirements play a key role in ontology development as they determine the knowledge that needs to be modelled. In addition, the analysis of such requirements can be used (a) to improve ontology testing by easing the automation of requirements into tests; (b) to improve the requirements specification activity; or (c) to ease ontology reuse by facilitating the identification of patterns. However, there is a lack of openly available ontological requirements published together with their associated ontologies, which hinders such analysis. Therefore, in this work we present CORAL (Corpus of Ontological Requirements Annotated with Lexico-syntactic patterns), an openly available corpus of 834 ontological requirements annotated and 29 lexico-syntactic patterns, from which 12 are proposed in this work. CORAL is openly available in three different open formats, namely, HTML, CSV and RDF under “Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International” license.

This paper presents two contributions to the field of Ontology Evaluation. First, a live catalogue of pitfalls that extends previous works on modeling errors with new pitfalls resulting from an empirical analysis of over 693 ontologies. Such a catalogue classifies pitfalls according to the Structural, Functional and Usability-Profiling dimensions. For each pitfall, we incorporate the value of its importance level (critical, important and minor) and the number of ontologies where each pitfall has been detected. Second, OOPS! (OntOlogy Pitfall Scanner!), a tool for detecting pitfalls in ontologies and targeted at newcomers and domain experts unfamiliar with description logics and ontology implementation languages. The tool operates independently of any ontology development platform and is available online. The evaluation of the system is provided both through a survey of users' satisfaction and worldwide usage statistics. In addition, the system is also compared with existing ontology evaluation tools in terms of coverage of pitfalls detected.

A growing number of ontologies are already available thanks to development initiatives in many different fields. In such ontology developments, developers must tackle a wide range of difficulties and handicaps, which can result in the appearance of anomalies in the resulting ontologies. Therefore, ontology evaluation plays a key role in ontology development projects. OOPS! is an on-line tool that automatically detects pitfalls, considered as potential errors or problems, and thus may help ontology developers to improve their ontologies. To gain insight in the existence of pitfalls and to assess whether there are differences among ontologies developed by novices, a random set of already scanned ontologies, and existing well-known ones, data of 406 OWL ontologies were analysed on OOPS!’s 21 pitfalls, of which 24 ontologies were also examined manually on the detected pitfalls. The various analyses performed show only minor differences between the three sets of ontologies, therewith providing a general landscape of pitfalls in ontologies.