The Semantic Web is now a reality. Several projects all around the world are already using tools technologies developed to support the second generation of the Web to provide machine-processable content for software agents, web services and applications. However, computers can not agree on a consesual language by themselves. Ontologies can be used as a way to provide this shared conceptualization, making posssible the desired communication among organizations, people and apllications. Several proposals have been already presented regarding ontology engineering - many supported by academic and industrial case studies. However, none of them encompasses all the requirements identified for an ontology construction project. This work describes the unification of different features extracted from those methodologies to build a process framework named KUP - the Knowledge Unified Process. This unified process is based on several industry best practices and on a well accepted ontology methodology evaluation framework. Two case studies were developed so as to support and validate this process framework. The first was the development of a semantic web solution for security information knowledge management and the second one was the integration of a skill management tool to a learning management system, through ontologies.