An Approach to Join Ontologies and Their Reuse in the Construction of Application Ontologies

The growth of the use of ontologies as an adequate formalism to represent knowledge led to the proposal of many techniques for their development. However, despite their relevance, these proposals do not systematically approach ontology reuse. Ontology reuse reduces the costs of ontology development, avoid the implementation of ontology components that already exist and also presents the potential to improve the quality of the ontologies outputted from this process since they are continually revised and evaluated. This article presents Onto Join, a process to join ontologies based on similarity analysis between the terms of the ontologies to be reused. The process is evaluated through an experiment to measure the precision of the ontology resulting from the join in the domains of tourism and sales.