Workforce development is a multidisciplinary domain in which policy, laws and regulations, social services, training and education, and information technology and systems are heavily involved. It is essential to have a semantic base accepted by the workforce development community for knowledge sharing and exchange. This paper describes how such a semantic base—the Workforce Open Knowledge Exchange (WOKE) Ontology—was built by using the adaptive modeling approach. The focus of this paper is to address questions such as how ontology designers should extract and model concepts obtained from different sources and what methodologies are useful along the steps of ontology development. The paper proposes a methodology framework “adaptive modeling” and explains the methodology through examples and some lessons learned from the process of developing the WOKE ontology.