In agile ontology-based software engineering projects support for modular reuse of ontologies from large existing remote repositories, ontology project life cycle management, and transitive dependency management are important needs. The contribution of this paper is a new design artifact called OntoMaven combined with a unified approach to ontology modularization, aspect-oriented ontology development, which was inspired by aspect-oriented programming. OntoMaven adopts the Apache Maven-based development methodology and adapts its concepts to knowledge engineering for Maven-based ontology development and management of ontology artifacts in distributed ontology repositories. The combination with aspect-oriented ontology development allows for fine-grained, declarative configuration of ontology modules.
@cite_10: Corporate Semantic Web describes the application of semantic technologies within enterprises for better knowledge management or enhanced IT service management. But, well-known cost- and process-oriented problems of ontology engineering hinder the employment of ontologies as a flexible, scalable, and cost effective means for integrating data in small and mid-sized enterprises.We propose an innovative ontology lifecycle, examine existing tools towards the functional requirements of the lifecycle phases, and propose the vision of an architecture supporting them integratively.
@cite_12: In this paper, we describe our ongoing work on the application of the Aspect-Oriented Programming paradigm to the problem of ontology modularization driven by overlapping modularization requirements. We examine commonalities between ontology modules and software aspects and propose an approach to applying the latter to the problem of a priori construction of modular ontologies and a posteriori ontology modularization.
New standardization efforts such as OMG Application Programming Interfaces for Knowledge Bases (OMG API4KB) www.omgwiki.org API4KB aim at the accessability and interoperability of heterogenous ontologies via standardized programming interfaces. OntoMaven can act as one possible implementation of the development support functionalities of OMG's API4KB. With its Maven-based approach for structuring the development phases into different goals providing different functionalities during the software development project's life cycle, OntoMaven supports in particular agile ontology development methods, such as COLM @cite_10 , as well as development methods which are inherently based on modularization such as aspect-oriented ontology development @cite_12 .