This document describes the Linked Open Terms (LOT) methodology, the methodological framework for OntoCommons. This document introduces the activities that should be performed in the ontology development process and includes recommendations and guidelines to put them into practice.
The document first presents the state of the art in ontology development methodologies, including well-known and agile approaches, which are considered as the basis for the LOT methodology.
Subsequently, the document introduces the additional inputs considered for the definition of LOT for OntoCommons, involving the domain-specific semantic landscape and the workshop on domain ontologies to identify current challenges and gaps in ontology development, and the demonstrators’ requirements on ontology tools and ontologies to identify existing requirements. Taking such inputs into account, an overview of LOT is presented.
The LOT methodology focuses on the reuse of terms existing in published ontologies and on the publication of the ontology according to the Linked Data principles. It is an iterative methodology that includes four main activities: ontology requirement specification, ontology implementation, ontology publication, and ontology maintenance.