Knowledge Reuse: Its Role and Implications for Upper Level Ontologies

There have been many ambitious attempts to develop both domain and large-scale, upper level ontologies, in the belief that ontologies are the key to success in the Semantic Web, web services, and other applications. However, there has been little research conducted on how to assess the effectiveness of these ontologies and how to reuse them in different contexts. This paper analyzes a well-known upper level ontology, CYC, using its ResearchCyc version. Problems and challenges faced in using ResearchCyc are identified and suggestions proposed for overcoming them. The solutions are intended to be generalizable to other upper level ontologies. Finally, based on the investigations presented in this paper, an application to the domain of collaborative learning is provided.