An Operational Approach for Capturing and Tracing the Ontology Development Process Marcela Vegetti 1 , Luciana Roldán 1 , Silvio Gonnet 1 , Gabriela Henning 2 and Horacio Leone 1 1 Ingar (CONICET/UTN) Avellaneda 3657 – S3002GJC – Santa Fe – Santa Fe – Argentina 2 Intec (CONICET/UNL) Güemes 3450 – S3000GLN– Santa Fe – Santa Fe – Argentina {mvegetti,lroldan,sgonnet,hleone}@santafe-conicet.gov.ar, ghenning@intec.unl.edu.ar Abstract. The history of an ontology development project, including its intermediate products, together with the executed activities, and the decisions made, might be of great importance in other future ontology developments. However, current tools supporting this kind of projects do not capture such information; thus, the process trace is lost, and any new ontology development project would start from scratch. This paper presents a framework meant to do overcome these deficiencies, allowing the capture and trace of such projects. 1. Introduction Until the mid-90s, ontologies were developed without addressing systematic procedures. Therefore, the ontology development process was an art rather than an engineering activity [Fernández-López et al., 1999]. In the last decade, many ontology development processes have changed from the traditional ones, performed by isolated knowledge engineers or domain experts, into collaborative processes executed by mixed teams [Bernaras et al. 1996]. In such teams, experts in knowledge acquisition and modeling, domain specialists, and experts in implementation languages collaborate to build ontologies, according to well-established methodologies. The expertise of each team member, as well as the executed activities, and the decisions made during the development process might be of great importance in future projects. However, current tools supporting ontology development processes do not capture such information; thus, the process trace is lost, and any new project would start from scratch. In fact, once a given ontology development process is finished, the things that remain are mainly isolated design products (e.g., requirement specifications, competency questions, class diagrams, specific language implementations, etc.), without an explicit representation of how these products were obtained, and with no capture of the rationale behind the process. In addition, ontology building is turning into a more professional engineering activity that needs to be managed and measured in order to obtain high quality results; and such management requires an explicit representation of the development process. The issues pointed out before constitute essential challenges that need to be addressed. In order to tackle them, this contribution proposes ONTOTracED, a framework to represent, capture and trace ontology development processes. This paper is organized 36