NeOn Tool Support for Building Ontologies by Reuse

Reusing elements of external ontologies is generally considered a good practice as it reduces the cost of ontology building and improves quality and interoperability. Yet, while many ontologies are now available for reuse, ontology developers still find difficult to efficiently identify relevant ontologies, to locate items of interest within them, and to integrate these elements in their ontologies. We believe that the main factor inhibiting ontology reuse relates to the lack of support for ontology developers to realize these tasks. The goal of the NeOn project (neon-project.org) is to provide a complete environment for the lifecycle management of interrelated, collaboratively built ontologies: networked ontologies. As part of this ambitious goal, NeOn intends to facilitate the rapid development of ontologies and ontology applications through reuse. In this demonstration, we focus on some of the tools that have been developed for the purpose of ontology reuse, which are integrated within the NeOn ontology engineering environment (the NeOn Toolkit).