In: Proc Int Conf on Formal Ontology and Information Systems - FOIS’98 (1998) http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/pclark/papers Ontology Reuse and Application Mike Uschold, Mike Healy, Keith Williamson, Peter Clark, Steven Woods Boeing Applied Research & Technology, PO Box 3707, Seattle, USA Abstract. In this paper, we describe an investigation into the reuse and appli- cation of an existing ontology for the purpose of specifying and formally developing software for aircraft design. Our goals were to clearly iden- tify the processes involved in the task, and assess the cost-effectiveness of reuse. Our conclusions are that (re)using an ontology is far from an automated process, and instead requires significant effort from the knowledge engineer. We describe and illustrate some intrinsic proper- ties of the ontology translation problem and argue that fully automatic translators are unlikely to be forthcoming in the foreseeable future. De- spite the effort involved, our subjective conclusions are that in this case knowledge reuse was cost-effective, and that it would have taken sig- nificantly longer to design the knowledge content of this ontology from scratch in our application. Our preliminary results are promising for achieving larger-scale knowledge reuse in the future. Keywords: ontology reuse, ontology application, ontology translation. 1 Introduction If there is to be a future for the construction of large-scale, knowledge-based systems, then it is essential that we are able to share and reuse representational components built by others. However, despite the potential advantages of such sharing, and the availability of such components in component libraries (e.g. [5]), it remains a challenging task to import and use such components. Despite the existence of many ontologies, evident from the literature, there are few published examples of such reuse (e.g. [2, 4, 9]). Furthermore, in cases where an ontology is reused, (e.g. as the basis for building a new ontology rather than starting from scratch) descriptions of how the ontologies are applied are terse or absent 1 . In this paper, we describe the start-to-finish process of reusing and applying an existing ontology. We conducted an experiment consisting of the following steps: a) take the engineering math ontology [8] written in Ontolingua [7] from the library of ontologies at the Stanford Knowledge Systems Laboratory (KSL) Ontology Server, b) translate it into a target specification language c) integrate it into the specification of an existing small engineering software component d) transform and refine the enhanced specification into executable code using Specware, a system for the specification and formal development of software and e) demonstrate the ability to add units-conversion capabilities and dimensional consistency-checking to the engineering software. 1 This common usage of the term ‘reuse’ is ambiguous, since it could be that both the original and the new ontology have yet to serve any specific purpose.