Onto4Reuse: Towards an Ontology Reuse Framework for Knowledge-intensive Software Engineering

Ontologies are a primary resource in knowledge-intensive software. However, reusing ontologies is challenging, which leads to redundant efforts, wasted resources, and hindered technological progress. This issue becomes even more severe and evident in the system engineering field, once engineering tasks rely on precise and well-structured data models and knowledge representation techniques. Particularly, the construction and infrastructure domain heavily relies on these structured data and their associated
models to annotate and classify the assets, and these data models are increasingly being represented using domain ontologies. This paper discusses a research agenda to address the general problem of ontology reuse, emphasizing to the system engineering areas of infrastructure asset management and modular building construction. We introduce the Onto4Reuse framework that aims at supporting software engineers in designing and embedding operational ontologies in knowledge-intensive software by leveraging on existing ontologies. The Onto4Reuse framework covers good practices on how an ontology should be developed in a way that it can be reused with lower efforts in other contexts. To achieve this goal, the Onto4Reuse framework is leveraged by four pillars: (1) Ontology design patterns; (2) ontology matching based on foundational ontology; (3) reverse engineering for grounding operational
ontologies in a foundational ontology; and (4) the application of the Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) data principles. These techniques are the foundations for developing ontology-driven software systems, and some functions will be exposed as services, which will be then applied to the aforementioned engineering cases in real-life utilization settings to validate the framework.