Ontologies have become core components of many large applications. This paper addresses the issues of why one would build an ontology and presents a methodology for creating ontologies based on declarative knowledge representation systems. It leverages the authors experiences developing and maintaining ontologies in a number of ontology environments including Protégé, Ontolingua, and Chimaera. It utilizes a wines knowledge base example to present the methodology. While it is aimed at users of frame-based systems, it can be useful for building ontologies in any object-centered system.

• Download the guide in PDF or HTML format
• Download the Protégé project that we use in the guide
• Download the PowerPoint presentation based on the guide (presented as a tutorial at the Semantic Web Working Symposium in 2001)

The Guide is also available in other languages:

• French (Trasnlated by A. Angjeli at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France)
• Portuguese (Translated by Ricardo Pietrobon's Biomedical Informatics group at Duke Translational Medicine Institute, Duke University Health System)
• Russian (Translated by A. Filyaev at the Eastern European subgroup of the International Forum on Educational Technologies and Society)
• Spanish (Translated by Erick Antezana, Ghent University, Belgium)

This paper is also available as SMI Technical Report SMI-2001-0880 and KSL Technical Report KSL-01-05