Proceedings of the ECAI-02 Workshop on Ontologies and Semantic Interoperability

One of the sources of heterogeneity of ontologies is that different ontologies have different necessities of modelling. This paper presents a biphase method to deal with these different necessities. Phase I of the method models how to model the ontology, obtaining a meta-model. Such meta-model can be expressed in LBIR, a formal and declarative language that has been specifically designed for this task. To save resources, a reference meta-model that can be modified and reused is provided. During phase II of the method, the ontology is modelled following the metamodel obtained in the first phase. Furthermore, a tool (called ODE) provides software support to the method. Such tool generates SQL schemas from LBIR, and allows the modelling of the ontology following the selected meta-model. This approach eases the interoperability between groups located in different geographical locations that have to build the same ontology, since the meta-model to be used can be exchanged through LBIR.