Why are ontologies not reused across the same domain?

Abstract

Even though one of the main characteristics of ontologies has always been claimed to be their reusability, throughout this paper it will be shown that ontology reuse across a given domain is not a consolidated practice. We have carried out a statistical study on ontology reuse in the ontologies collected in Linked Open Vocabularies (LOV), in addition to a particular analysis of a use case. The results of the present work show that, when building an ontology, the heterogeneity between the needed conceptualization and that of available ontologies, as well as the deficiencies in some of such ontologies (concerning documentation, licensing, etc.) are important obstacles for reusing ontologies of the same domain of the ontology under development. A possible approach to lessen these problems could be the creation of communities similar to open software ones in charge of developing and maintaining ontologies.