A fast and economic ontology engineering approach towards improving capability matching: Application to an online engineering collaborative platform

• A novel ontology building methodology that generates cross-domain ontologies.
• Richer ontological structure via statistical social network analysis.
• Richer reasoning paths via the structure for more effective machine interpretation.
• Directional weighted relationships improve the decision making & logical reasoning.
• Better automated information filtering output proved by field experiment.

Fulfilling needs through internal and external resources is a key business requirement. To better enable this, description of both needs and resources, using a common domain language is required. Using techniques from social network analysis (SNA) this paper describes a SENSUS-based methodology which generates domain ontology that can provide the breadth and depth of coverage required for automated need and resource matching systems. The mechanism described also enriches the semantic relationships in the generated ontology to form a network structure. This enables concept investigation to be undertaken from multiple perspectives, with fuzzy matching and enhanced reasoning through directional weight-specified relationships. The methodology was used to derive an ontology for engineering and tested against a traditionally derived and structured ontology. The methodology has the flexibility and utility to be of benefit in a wide range need and resource matching business applications.