Ontologies: How can They be Built?

Ontologies are an important component in many areas, such as knowledge management and organization, electronic commerce and information retrieval and extraction. Several methodologies for ontology building have been proposed. In this article, we provide an overview of ontology building. We start by characterizing the ontology building process and its life cycle. We present the most representative methodologies for building ontologies from scratch, and the proposed techniques, guidelines and methods to help in the construction task. We analyze and compare these methodologies. We describe current research issues in ontology reuse. Finally, we discuss the current trends in ontology building and its future challenges, namely, the new issues for building ontologies for the Semantic Web.