The Landscape of Ontology Reuse Approaches

TL;DR

This paper surveys current ontology reuse approaches, analyzing their motivations, strategies, benefits, and limitations, aiming to support developers in making informed reuse decisions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive review of ontology reuse strategies and critically analyzes two representative approaches to highlight their strengths and weaknesses.

Findings

Current practices are subjective and case-dependent.

No effective decision-support solutions exist for ontology reuse.

Analysis of two approaches reveals their respective merits and limitations.

Abstract

Ontology reuse aims to foster interoperability and facilitate knowledge reuse. Several approaches are typically evaluated by ontology engineers when bootstrapping a new project. However, current practices are often motivated by subjective, case-by-case decisions, which hamper the definition of a recommended behaviour. In this chapter we argue that to date there are no effective solutions for supporting developers' decision-making process when deciding on an ontology reuse strategy. The objective is twofold: (i) to survey current approaches to ontology reuse, presenting motivations, strategies, benefits and limits, and (ii) to analyse two representative approaches and discuss their merits.