Reuse existing ontologies in an ontology development process - an integration-oriented ontology development methodology

Ontologies are the building block of the Semantic Web and a diverse range of ontologies of different domains have been constructed and shared by the ontology community. In this regard it is not impractical to reuse existing ontologies that are available publicly instead of constructing ontology from scratch each time. This paper proposes and develops guidelines on how to select ontology merging and integration in an ontology development process. The paper aims to address the gap in literature where little information and guidance are available in determining how to reuse ontology through the process of ontology merging and integration. In addition the paper also proposes a semi-automatic way of performing ontology integration. An application scenario has been presented to illustrate how the proposed methodology is applied.