A hybrid approach to developing a cyber security ontology

The process of developing an ontology cannot be fully automated at the current state-of-the-art. However, leaving the tedious, time-consuming and error-prone task of ontology development entirely to humans has problems of its own, including limited staff budgets and semantic disagreements between experts. Thus, a hybrid computer/expert approach is advocated. The research challenge is how to minimize and optimally organize the task of the expert(s) while maximally leveraging the power of the computer and of existing computer-readable documents. The purpose of this paper is two-fold. First we present such a hybrid approach by describing a knowledge acquisition tool that we have developed. This tool makes use of an existing Bootstrap Ontology and proposes likely locations of concepts and semantic relationships, based on a text book, to a domain expert who can decide on them. The tool is attempting to minimize the number of interactions. Secondly we are proposing the notion of an augmented ontology specifically for pedagogical use. The application domain of this work is cyber-security education, but the ontology development methods are applicable to any educational topic.