Reference Ontology and (ONTO)² Agent: The Ontology Yellow Pages

Abstract.

Knowledge reuse by means of ontologies faces three important problems at present: (1) there are no standardized identifying features that characterize ontologies from the user point of view; (2) there are no web sites using the same logical organization, presenting relevant information about ontologies; and (3) the search for appropriate ontologies is hard, time-consuming and usually fruitless. To solve the above problems, we present: (1) a living set of features that allow us to characterize ontologies from the user point of view and have the same logical organization; (2) a living domain ontology about ontologies (called Reference Ontology) that gathers, describes and has links to existing ontologies; and (3) (ONTO)² Agent, the ontology-based WWW broker about ontologies that uses Reference Ontology as a source of its knowledge and retrieves descriptions of ontologies that satisfy a given set of constraints.