Product Line Based Ontology Reuse in Context-aware E-business Environment

Improving the reusability of ontology is recognized as increasingly important due to the prevalence of OWL research and applications. But there exists no convincing methodology and tool support in this direction yet. In this paper, we apply ideas from the research and practice with software product lines in order to explore this issue. The ontology is developed and managed according to the commonalities and variabilities underlying a specific problem domain. Meta-ontology is used in order to improve the reusability, evolve-ability and customizability of ontology. Another advantage is being able to generate needed ontology with the created meta-ontology implemented with XVCL (XML based variant configuration language) technology. We demonstrate our product line based reuse approach with an example B2C application