Safe and Economic Re-Use of Ontologies: A Logic-Based Methodology and Tool Support

Ontology design and maintenance require an expertise in both the domain of application and the ontology language. Realistic ontologies typically model different aspects of an application domain at various levels of granularity; prominent examples are the National Cancer Institute Ontology (NCI), which describes diseases, drugs, proteins, etc., and GALEN, which represents knowledge mainly about the human anatomy, but also about other domains such as drugs. Established ontologies such as NCI and GALEN are used in various applications as reference ontologies, i.e., ontology developers reuse these ontologies and customise them for their specific needs. For example, ontology designers use classes from NCI or GALEN and refine them (e.g., add new sub-classes), generalise them (e.g., add new super-classes), or refer to them when expressing a property of some other class (e.g., define the class Polyarticular JRA by referring to the class Joint from GALEN). One of such reuse cases is the development of an ontology, called JRAO, that describes a kind of arthritis called JRA (Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis) within the Health-e-Child project. Following the ILAR, JRAO describes in detail various kinds of JRA by means of the joints affected, the occurrence of fever, and the required treatment. GALEN and NCI contain information that is relevant to JRA such as detailed descriptions of the human joints as well as diseases and their symptoms. Figure 1 shows a fragment of NCI including the class for JRA as well as our reuse scenario, where C1, . . . , C7 stand for subclasses of JRA to be defined in JRAO. The JRAO developers want to reuse knowledge from NCI and GALEN for three reasons: (a) they want to save time through reusing existing ontologies rather than writing their own; (b) they value knowledge that is commonly accepted by the community and used in similar applications; (c) they are not experts in all areas covered by NCI and GALEN.