HCOME: A tool-supported methodology for engineering living ontologies Konstantinos Kotis 1 , George A. Vouros 1 , Jerónimo Padilla Alonso 1 1 Dept. of Information & Communications Systems Engineering, University of the Aegean, Karlovassi, Samos, 83100, Greece {kkot,georgev,pgeron}@aegean.gr Abstract. The fast emergent areas of the Semantic Web and knowledge man- agement push researchers to new efforts concerning ontology engineering. The development of ontologies must be seen as a dynamic process that in most of the cases starts with an initial rough ontology that is later revised, refined, en- riched, populated and filled in with details. Ontology evolution has to be sup- ported through the entire ontology lifecycle, resulting to a living ontology. The aim of this paper is to present the Human-Centered Ontology Engineering Methodology (HCOME) for the development and evaluation of living ontolo- gies in the context of communities of knowledge workers. The methodology aims to empower knowledge workers to continuously manage their formal con- ceptualizations in their day-to-day tasks. We conjecture that this methodology can only be effectively supported by eclectic human-centered ontology man- agement environments, such as the HCONE and SharedHCONE. 1 Introduction Ontologies have been realized as the key technology to shaping and exploiting infor- mation for the effective management of knowledge and for the evolution of the Se- mantic Web and its applications. We consider communities of knowledge workers that are involved in knowledge-intensive tasks within an organization, or World Wide Web users with common interests. Knowledge workers are unfamiliar with knowledge engineering principles and methods, and most of the times have little or no training on using ontology specification tools. In such a distributed setting ontologies establish a common vocabulary for community members to interlink, combine, and communicate knowledge shaped through practice and interaction, binding the knowledge processes of creating, importing, capturing, retrieving, and using knowledge. However, it seems that there will always be the case that community members devise more than one on- tologies for the same domain. For community members to explicate, maintain and evaluate the changing conceptualization of a domain, they must get powerful tools that will allow them to edit, review, update and maintain formal ontologies, on their own as well as in collaboration with colleagues [1].