Developing domain ontologies is not an easy task and requires close collaboration between domain experts who know the domain and ontology experts who can formalise and formulate this knowledge into the form of an ontology. To facilitate the collaboration between domain and ontology experts, a tool called excel2onto has been developed. This tool allows the domain expert to define the concepts that should be ontologised in a familiar Excel table rather than having to learn specialised tools (like Protégé) or formal languages (like OWL2) for working and expressing ontologies. This tool does not replace close interactions between the domain experts and ontologists but allows the domain experts to independently collect and work with the concepts that should be ontologised. When the initial set of concepts has been collected, the excel2onto tool can be used to generate an OWL representation of the concepts. The OWL representation will typically require further refinement by the ontologist and probably also additional iterations with the domain expert – an important part of the workflow that excel2onto supports by allowing to update the ontology from an updated Excel sheet.

Figure 7. Screenshot of the populated Excel template providing an easy and familiar interface for the domain experts where they can define the concepts to be included in a domain ontology. This example is from the development of the Domain Ontology for Concrete.

Using the excel2onto tool together with the above-described workflow, has proven to be a pleasant and efficient way to develop domain ontologies.