Ontology Engineering: A Reality Check Elena Paslaru Bontas Simperl 1 and Christoph Tempich 2 1 Free University of Berlin, Takustr. 9, 14195 Berlin, Germany paslaru@inf.fu-berlin.de 2 Institute AIFB, University of Karlsruhe, 76128 Karlsruhe, Germany tempich@aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de Abstract. The theoretical results achieved in the ontology engineering field in the last fifteen years are of incontestable value for the prospected large scale take-up of semantic technologies. Their range of application in real-world projects is, however, so far comparatively limited, despite the growing number of ontologies online available. This restricted impact was confirmed in a three month empirical study, in which we examined over 34 contemporary ontology development projects from a process- and costs-oriented perspective. In this paper we give an account of the results of this study. We conclude that ontology engineering research should strive for a unified, lightweight and component-based method- ological framework, principally targeted at domain experts, in addition to consolidating the existing approaches. 1 Introduction The emergence of the Semantic Web has marked an important step in the evo- lution of ontologies. Regarded as a means for a shared knowledge understanding and a way to (formally) represent real world domains, they are expected to play a crucial role in data and application integration at public and corporate level. In the last decades researchers have proposed process methodologies for various ontology engineering scenarios [7]. Given the difficulties related to building and maintaining ontologies, a methodological framework provides important bene- fits: it structures the process, thus breaking its complexity down to manageable tasks, clarifies the responsibilities of the process participants, increases its trace- ability and enables systematic quality assurance procedures. The theoretical results achieved in the ontology engineering field in the last fifteen years are of incontestable value for the prospected large scale take-up of semantic technologies. Their range of application in real-world projects is, however, so far comparatively limited, despite the growing number of ontolo- gies online available. 1 This restricted impact was confirmed in a three month empirical study, in which we surveyed 34 recent ontology engineering projects from industry and academia in order to give an account of the current ontology engineering practice and of the efforts involved in these activities. The study focused on process-related rather than modeling issues; in particular it analyzed 1 Refer for example to http://swoogle.umbc.edu/ for recent statistics on this topic.