GO-FOR: A Goal-Oriented Framework for Ontology Reuse

Ontologies have been successfully used to assign semantics in the Semantic Web context and to enable integration of data from different systems or different sources. However, building ontologies is not a trivial task. Ontology reuse can help in this matter. The search and selection of ontologies to be reused should consider the alignment between their scope and the scope of the ontology being developed. In this paper, we discuss how goal modeling can be helpful in this context and we propose GO-FOR, a framework in which goals are the central elements to promote ontology reuse. We introduce goal-oriented ontology patterns as a new type of pattern to be applied to develop ontologies in a goal-oriented approach. Results of the use of GO-FOR to build an ontology used to integrate water quality data are also shown in this paper.