On the reusability of ontologies in knowledge-system design

The authors describe a case study which supports the claim that ontologies are reusable components in the design of knowledge systems. An ontology documents important domain assumptions which would otherwise remain implicit. Whereas a conceptual (or formal) system specification differs between different knowledge systems (even in the same domain), they show the underlying ontology to be invariant. This makes ontologies reusable for knowledge-system design. They illustrate this by discussing how a single legal ontology has been used for the construction of both a planning and an assessment system and argue that the same ontology can be reused for other knowledge systems as well.