Interlocking Institutional Worlds (IWs) is a concept explaining the need to interoperate between institutions (or players), to solve problems of common interest in a given domain. Managing knowledge in the IWs domain is complex, but promoting knowledge sharing based on standards and common terms agreeable to all players is essential and is something that must be established. In this sense, ontologies, as a conceptual tool and a key component of knowledge-based systems, have been used by organizations for effective knowledge management of the domain of discourse. There are many methodologies that have been proposed by several researchers during the last decade. However, designing a domain ontology for IWs needs a well-defined ontology development methodology. Therefore, in this article, a survey has been conducted to compare ontology development methodologies between 2015 and 2020. The purpose of this survey is to identify limitations and benefits of previously developed ontology development methodologies. The criteria for the comparison of methodologies has been derived from evolving trends in literature. Our findings give some guidelines that help to define a suitable methodology for designing any domain ontology under the domain of interlocking institutional worlds. © 2020 Science and Information Organization.