Reengineering the Core Grid Ontology

Ontology engineering is a relatively new and immature science. With new possible applications and often non-normative standard proposals emerging rapidly it is hard to find one universal formalization of ontology engineering rules. This causes many authors to fall into a trap of focusing on the application of an ontology and not giving enough attention to the ontology itself. Such approach results in ontologies that are hardly reusable, overcomplicated and difficult to understand which is the exact opposite of what a good ontology should be. While many problems are very specific we attempt to bring the attention to a set of common ones with the intention of instructing how to fix or avoid them. Here, we explain how we improved an existing ontology, Core Grid Ontology (CGO), that we use as an example. It is not our intention to focus on the quality of this ontology, which otherwise fits our needs well. Indeed, CGO was reused in the project Agents in Grid (AiG), where it was slightly modified then extended [1]. We build on that experience, starting with the reengineering of CGO that we will later extend with the improvements of the AiG ontology.