Abstract
Ontologies are a useful tool for knowledge representation, sharing and reuse. Their potential has been recognised in a variety of domains and the number of publicly available ontologies, more than 10,000 as shown by dedicated search engines (Swoogle 2009), is a good indicator of the scale of development and use of ontologies across disciplines. Developing an ontology is a time consuming process which requires a high level of domain specific expertise. Ontologies are by definition designed to be shared and reused. Ontology reuse is a paramount activity for knowledge engineers who, in turn, are expected to reduce the cost of development and to promote interoperability between applications. This is further amplified by the fact that many of existing ontologies cover complementary and/or overlapping domains. The aim of this work is to investigate the practical aspects of ontology reuse and development and devise a framework for these tasks with a focus on the domain of Process Systems Engineering. This is achieved by investigating a number of practical aspects of reusing ontologies with a focus in the domain of Process Systems Engineering, during the process of developing a full-scale ontology for the domain of Industrial Symbiosis – the eSymbiosis ontology. The practical aspects of reusing ontologies have been addressed throughout the lifecycle of ontology development. The proposed methodology – called MetROn – is focusing on reusing ontologies as well as making an ontology reusable. Also, a high level framework for evaluating existing ontology for potential reuse has also been devised. Both the proposed methodology and the proposed framework for ontology evaluation have been validated with the case study of eSymbiosis ontology.