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    Theory-based knowledge acquisition for ontology development
    (2016) Scheuermann, Andreas; Kirn, Stefan
    This thesis concerns the problem of knowledge acquisition in ontology development. Knowledge acquisition is essential for developing useful ontologies but it is a complex and error-prone task. When capturing specific knowledge about a particular domain of interest, the problem of knowledge acquisition occurs due to linguistic, cognitive, modelling, and methodical difficulties. For overcoming these four difficulties, this research proposes a theory-based knowledge acquisition method. By studying the knowledge base, basic terms and concepts in the areas of ontology, ontology development, and knowledge acquisition are defined. A theoretical analysis of knowledge acquisition identifies linguistic, cognitive, modelling, and methodical difficulties, for which a survey of 15 domain ontologies provides further empirical evidence. A review of existing knowledge acquisition approaches shows their insufficiencies for reducing the problem of knowledge acquisition. As the underpinning example, a description of the domain of transport chains is provided. Correspondingly, a theory in business economics, i.e. the Contingency Approach, is selected. This theory provides the key constructs, relationships, and dependencies that can guide knowledge acquisition in the business domain and, thus, theoretically substantiate knowledge acquisition. Method construction uses an approach from the field of Method Engineering, which defines how to develop a tailored method with respect to specific requirements on method design, functionality, components, and the underlying assumptions. The development of the method for theory-based knowledge acquisition covers the specification of the (method and outcome) metamodel, activity model, outcomes, roles, and techniques. The evaluation comprises two descriptive approaches to demonstrate the proposed method’s utility. First, a criteria-based approach evaluates the method with respect to design-related, functional, and component-related requirements. Second, a scenario-based evaluation applies the method within a scenario from the domain of intermodal transport chains for acquiring knowledge to build a domain ontology. The contribution of this research is a theory-based knowledge acquisition method for ontology development. The application and usefulness of this method is demonstrated for a particular domain (transport chains) and uses a particular theory of business economics (the Contingency Approach).