Three-Layer OWL Ontology Design

Ontology reuse is often predicated on agreement to the semantics wholly defined within an ontology document. But when faced with overly constrained semantics that one might partially reject, might one instead prefer reduced ontological commitment? In this paper, we describe how three layered ontology design promotes maximal reuse of domain ontologies by separating taxonomically organized domain terminology from i) disjointess, ii) complex expressions that define a world view, and iii) application specific requirements that impose a specific data model for data exchange and document validation.