Ontologies play a crucial role in bringing the Semantic Web vision to its full potential. Ontologies are developed at different levels of abstraction and by different people for various purposes. Knowledge represented by the ontologies is scattered because of existence of many ontologies representing the same concepts, therefore it becomes difficult to analyse, study and use the knowledge sprea...

This paper explores an alternative vision for upper ontologies which is more effective at facilitating the sharability and reusability of ontologies. The notion of generic ontologies is characterized through the formalization of ontological commitments and choices. Ontology repositories are used to modularize ontologies so that any particular upper ontology is equivalent to the union of a set o...