Question Driven Semantics Interpretation for Collaborative Knowledge Engineering and Ontology Reuse

Ontology integration, alignment, and reuse are at the heart of semantic Web vision. The alignment between two ontologies can be achieved easily provided both share the same axiomatic space. This in turn can be achieved by reusing constructs from foundational ontologies and standard domain thesauri. Although the current breed of ontology development methodologies and tools have made it a lot easier to build a new ontology, reusing concepts from existing ontologies remains difficult. The main reasons for this are the ambiguities in semantics interpretations of concepts from foundational ontologies, which are biased by philosophical aspirations, domain nuance, and design rationale introduced at the time of their creation. In this paper we have introduced a novel methodology for sense disambiguation to help the human expert in semantics interpretation. It is a collaborative and interaction intensive question driven approach based on a DOLCE aligned form of WordNet -OntoWordNet. The approach was used successfully for ontology reuse during the collaborative ontology building process; results are provided here.