Experiences on applying SPL Engineering Techniques to Design a (Re) usable Ontology in the Energy Domain

Abstract

Global ontologies must provide a balance of reusabilityusability to minimize the ontology reuse effort in different applications. To achieve this balance, ontology design methods focus on designing layered ontologies that classify into abstraction layers the common domain knowledge (reused by most applications) and the variant domain knowledge (reused by specific application types). This classification is performed from scratch by domain experts and ontology engineers. Hence, the design of reusable and usable ontologies that represent complex domains takes a lot of effort. Considering how common and variant software features are classified when designing Software Product Lines (SPLs), we argue that SPL engineering techniques can facilitate the domain knowledge classification taking as reference existing ontologies. In this paper, we show the experiences of applying SPL and ontology design techniques in combination to design a reusable and usable global ontology for the energy domain. Domain experts and ontology engineers evaluated the proposed method. The results show that SPL engineering techniques enable a systematic and accurate domain knowledge classification, thus saving ontology design effort.

DABGEO: A reusable and usable global energy ontology for the energy domain

“…To date, layered ontologies have been applied to achieve a balance of reusability-usability [17]. They classify into different abstraction layers the common domain knowledge (abstract knowledge reused by most applications) and the variant domain knowledge (specific knowledge reused only by certain application types) [14], [18].…”

“…The knowledge required by specific application types and reused in specific ontologies was considered as variant. To see in more detail how the layered structure of DABGEO was designed, we refer the reader to [17].…”