Practical Experiences in Trading Off Ontology Usability and Reusability

This paper describes the practical application of ontologies in designing knowledge-based systems. We built a common ontology to allow knowledge sharing among several applications in the domain of air campaign planning. In trying to reuse this shared ontology, we confirmed previous findings in the knowledge acquisition literature: it is difficult to simultaneously obtain high usability (i.e., adequacy for a specific use) and reusability (i.e., adequacy for several uses). In this article, we discuss some of the reasons for this trade-off, and present some lessons learned about the limitations of current tools for ontology construction in practical applications.