Characterising the Gap Between Theory and Practice of Ontology Reuse

Abstract

Ontology reuse is a complex process that requires the support of methodologies and tools to minimise errors and to keep the ontologies consistent and coherent. Although the vast majority of ontology engineering methodologies include a reuse phase, and reuse has been investigated for different tasks and purposes (e.g.ontology integration), this body of work does not seem to translate into practice, neither in the form of strict criteria for reuse, nor as a set of community proposed guidelines. In this paper, we report the salient results from a study aimed at ontology developers and practitioners, whose objective is to gain an insight into the gap between the theory and the practice of ontology reuse. Thefocus of our study is to gain practitioners' views on i) their preferred reuse approaches; ii) the types of ontologies they tend to reuse (e.g. specific domain ontologies or upper-level ontologies)iii) what reporting information they deem useful when deciding which ontology to reuse; iv) what are the main reasons deterring them from reusing an ontology. Our findings confirm and extend established results from the literature, but in addition, the study provides a fresh view on the practice of reuse with an explicit focus on highly experienced developers and moderately experienced ones. The study corroborates the need for a comprehensive set of recommendations, that are widely accepted by the community, and are possibly implemented in development tools.