Towards an Ontology Design Architecture

As the world enters the age of “big data”, new ways to represent and reason on enormous amounts of data are demanded and expected. Work in developing ontologies and reasoning approaches have taken steps towards addressing these needs. However, ontology development is not usually perceived as an engineering activity. Developers often overlook fundamental questions and concerns of ontology design and an ad hoc “one-time use” mentality has emerged. In this position paper, we address this lack of design consideration in ontology development by adapting existing software design patterns. We propose an ontology design architecture based on the model-view-controller (MVC-II) architectural style in an effort to present a new engineering view of designing ontologies.