...ontology engineering methods have so far neglected the early phase of ontology building where a conceptualization only exists rather informally and undergoes continuous evolution through collaboration and interaction within the community ... current research and development concentrates more on what we can do as soon as we have ontologies—rather than having a closer look at the processes of creating and especially maintaining such (domain-specific) ontologies. .... The main challenge is then how to leverage this implicit and informal ontology building for the explicit formal models needed for semantic approaches. I

Based on the knowledge maturing process introduced in [Sch05], we have to view ontology building as a maturing process (see fig. 1). It starts with some emerging ideas of the individual without having a clear or even shared terminology, communicated only informally. These vague concept ideas are gradually disseminated into the community where the community discusses and consolidates them. The result of this can still be textual definitions without a formal semantics. The formalization is accomplished in a third phase in which a common conceptualization and terminology matures until a formal ontology is established. These maturing phases apply to individual parts (concepts, relations etc.) of the ontology so that the ontology as a whole is under continuous transformation and always characterized by different degrees of maturity. Therefore, we need support for (a) the transition of the individual emergent idea level to the community level and (b) the community level itself where we must not require too much formalization at the beginning and where the users can start with informal structures like tagging which they can formalize later on.

....we have to acknowledge that ontology building is not the primary activity of knowledge workers but that vocabularies emerge in their daily work implicitly. Thus, we need to integrate work processes with ontology building processes. ... Building ontologies must be integrated with the users’ usual tasks, i.e., when using ontologies (e.g., for annotation, or navigation); necessary changes must be possible on demand and with low effort. This especially implies that we have no separate setup phase, but rather continuous maintenance.

Partly embedded into methodologies, editing tools like Protégé1 or KAON OIModeler [MMS03] are commonly used for ontology building. [...] Like the methodologies, these tools are not geared towards knowledge workers and their work processes and thus not task-embedded. Further, they consider ontology construction as an isolated and detached task. The evolutionary process, where the concepts are informal at first and yet not established, is not supported.