The Landscape of Ontology Reuse Approaches
This paper addresses the lack of structured guidance for ontology engineers in selecting an ontology reuse strategy, which currently relies on subjective, case-by-case decisions.
This paper surveys current approaches to ontology reuse, highlighting their motivations, strategies, benefits, and limitations. It argues that there are no effective solutions to support developers' decision-making processes when choosing an ontology reuse strategy.
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.