Recent work in Artificial Intelligence is exploring the use of formal ontologies as a way of specifying content-specific agreements for the sharing and reuse of knowledge among software entities. We take an engineering perspective on the development of such ontologies. Formal ontologies are viewed as designed artifacts, formulated for specific purposes and evaluated against objective design criteria. We describe the role of ontologies in supporting knowledge sharing activities, and then present a set of criteria to guide the development of ontologies for these purposes. We show how these criteria are applied in case studies from the design of ontologies for engineering mathematics and bibliographic data. Selected design decisions are discussed, and alternative representation choices and evaluated against the design criteria.

Information sharing and decision coordination are central problems for large-scale product development. This paper proposes a framework for supporting a knowledge medium [32]: a computational environment in which explicitly represented knowledge serves as a communication medium among people and their programs. The framework is designed to support information sharing and coordinated communication among members of a product development organization, particularly for the tasks of design knowledge capture, dynamic notification of design changes, and active management of design dependencies. The proposed technology consists of a shared knowledge representation (language and vocabulary), protocols for foreign data encapsulation and posting to the shared environment, and mechanisms for content-directed routing of posted information to interested parties via subscription and notification services. A range of possible applications can be explored in this framework, depending on the ...