ONTOCOM Cost Estimation Tools

Ontocom is a cost estimation model for the area of Ontology Engineering, whose goal is to predict the costs (expressed in person months) arising in typical classes of ontology engineering processes such as ontology building, reuse or maintenance. At the moment, Ontocom is a prototypical non-calibrated cost model, which will be permanently refined with the collection of empiric data on person month efforts spent in developing real-world ontologies. Designed in the tradition of Software Engineering, Ontocom uses a parametric prediction equation which contains product-, personnel and project management-related effort multipliers. These effort multipliers adjust the nominal development effort to reflect the specialties of the ontology and of the underlying engineering process. Depending on their positive or negative influence on the nominal value, they are rated with values from Very Low to Very High. If a particular activity increases the nominal development effort, then it would be rated with values such as High and Very High. Otherwise, if it causes a decrease of the nominal costs, then it would be rated with values such as Low and Very Low. ONTOCOM has been initially developed at the Free University of Berlin in collaboration with the Institute AIFB (University of Karlsruhe - TH). Currently, ONTOCOM is further advanced at STI Innsbruck.