Development of Domain Ontology for Enhancing Design Understand-Ability for Developers and End-Users

Ontology defines entity and their relationship among knowledge concepts within a problem domain that may provide better specifications of a system blue-print. Such basic specification can provide an interoperable format that enhances understand-ability to both human users and developers. This makes the ontology as one of the prominent techniques specially to systemize problem domains. In this paper, we describe importance of a domain ontology development, reporting on our experience in a user-oriented applications development project. The project was designed to address issues related to both human users' access to and developers' understandability on developed record management systems. Through a formal methodology we developed a domain ontology model and promoted its unique significance specially for developing system solution. Findings from our studies suggest that ontology enables provisions of design support both to end users and system developers to reflect user's real requirements that in turn maximize various user benefits.