There is no generally accepted method of building ontologies. The best that can be said at the moment is that there are some criteria that one can use in determining how good an ontology is. Gruber [11] lists clarity, coherence, extensibility, minimal encoding bias and minimal ontological commitment. Fox [14] adds the criterion of competency, which can be measured by setting out a list of questions which should be answerable by deduction from the ontological definitions. (This leads to an important question of whether there is a fundamental difference between an ontology and a knowledge base. Some say that an ontology should be runnable as a knowledge base and can be incrementally changed to create application-specific knowledge bases. The arguments of others would imply that what is included in, say, the enteprise ontology defines and characterises the domain of enterprise modelling, and thus constrains what is possible to include in the knowledge base or enterprise model. What is actually included in the knowledge base or enterprise model defines and characterises a particular model of a particular enterprise.)
However, beyond trying to ensure that a set of good quality, representative people are involved in building ontologies, there is little definition of the process, or best practice method.