Ontology Development Guide

The TMCore EPiServer Module provides a simple, but extremely powerful approach to organising and presenting information on a website. The content organisation of the site is driven by the site's ontology. The ontology is a set of information that defines the principal subjects of the site, how those subjects relate to each other, and how the subjects relate to the site content.

It is important when reading this document to keep in mind the distinction between the subjects of a site and the content of a site. The content is the collection of documents, web pages, images and other resources that you present to the user through your site. The subjects are the things that your content is describing or representing in some way. For example on an e-commerce site, the site content would be product descriptions, product reviews and price lists, whereas the site subjects would be the products it sells and for the categories that those products fall into. Alternatively an intranet site for an architect's office might have subjects for each of the employees, the projects that they are working on and the customers and contractors for those projects and it would have content such as contracts and drawings.

In this article we will go through the basic stages of defining an ontology for a simple project-oriented intranet site. We will also show how you can use the TMEditor web application to enter your ontology into the topic map that organises your site. You can use this process as the basis for defining and entering your own site ontology. This article is not intended to be a detailed guide to content analysis and information architecture - so you will find that the analysis phase is described in very high-level terms. Our real purpose with this article is to show how you can go from the output of analysis to a topic map that you can use to organise the content of your EPiServer site. To make our discussion more concrete we will work through a simple example of designing and implementing an ontology for a company intranet.