A process for building a domain ontology: an experience in developing a government budgetary ontology

During the last years, there has been a growing concern on ontology due to its ability to explicitly describe data semantics in a common way, independently of data source characteristics, providing a schema that allows data interchanging among heterogeneous information systems and users. Several works have been aimed to improve ontology technological aspects, like representation languages and inference mechanisms, and less attention has been paid to practical results of development method application. This paper presents a discussion on the process and product of an experience in developing ontology for the Public Sector whose organization requires a strong knowledge managment. Particularly, this process was applied to develop ontology for Budget Domain.