Designing metadata with existing application ontologies

Among various metadata design difficulties, 1) designing subsumption relation of two classes, 2) designing diverse properties of a given class, and 3) determining whether an item should be designed as class or property, are three common difficulties faced by human designers. We devised a metadata referring method, which provides example-based design information by organizing existing metadata defined in multiple ontologies in table formats. Our referring method provides: 1) existing class hierarchy definitions, 2) similar and specific property definitions, and 3) overviews of class hierarchy and property definitions of a given class, after searching through numerous application ontologies. An evaluation experiment has revealed that our method is useful in design difficulties 1) and 2), but not in 3)