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7: Top-Down Ontology Development

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    Having an ontology language is one thing, but what to represent, and how, is quite another. In the previous chapter, we looked at answering “Where do you start?” and “How to proceed” with methodologies, but we are still left with answering: How can you avoid reinventing the wheel? What can guide you to make the process easier to carry it out successfully? How can you make the best of ‘legacy’ material? There are two principal approaches, being the so-called top-down and bottom-up ontology development approaches with their own set of methods, tools, and artifacts. In this chapter, we focus on the former and in the next chapter on the latter, where each can be seen as a refinement of some aspects of an overall methodology like introduced in Chapter 5.


    This page titled 7: Top-Down Ontology Development is shared under a CC BY 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Maria Keet via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform.