Ontology reuse and application

In this paper, we describe an investigation into the reuse and application of an existing ontology for the purpose of specifying and formally developing software for aircraft design. Our goals were to clearly identify the processes involved in the task, and assess the cost-effectiveness of reuse. Our conclusions are that (re)using an ontology is far from an automated process, and instead requires significant effort from the knowledge engineer. We describe and illustrate some intrinsic properties of the ontology translation problem and argue that fully automatic translators are unlikely to be forthcoming in the foreseeable future. Despite the effort involved, our subjective conclusions are that in this case knowledge reuse was cost-effective, and that it would have taken significantly longer to design the knowledge content of this ontology from scratch in our application. Our preliminary results are promising for achieving larger-scale knowledge reuse in the future.