MODDALS Methodology for Designing Layered Ontology Structures

Global ontologies include common vocabularies to provide interoperability among different applications. These ontologies require a balance of reusability-usability to minimise the ontology reuse effort in different applications. To achieve such a balance, reusable and usable ontology design methodologies provide guidelines to design and develop layered ontology networks. Layered ontology networks classify into different abstraction layers the domain knowledge relevant to many applications (common domain knowledge) and the domain knowledge relevant only to certain application types (variant domain knowledge). This knowledge classification is performed from scratch by domain experts and ontology engineers. This process is a heavy workload, making it difficult to design the layered structures of reusable and usable global ontologies. 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. This paper presents a methodology that provides guidelines to design the layered structure of reusable and usable ontology networks called MODDALS. In contrast to previous methods, MODDALS applies SPL engineering techniques to systematically (1) identify the ontology common and variant domain knowledge and (2) classify it into different abstraction layers taking as reference existing ontologies. This approach complements domain experts’ and ontology engineers’ expertise, preventing them from classifying the domain knowledge from scratch facilitating the design of the layered ontology structure. MODDALS methodology is evaluated in the design of the layered structure of a reusable and usable global ontology for the energy domain. The results show that MODDALS enables to classify the domain knowledge taking as reference existing ontologies