Experiences on applying SPL engineering techniques to design a (Re) usable ontology in the energy domain

Global ontologies must provide a balance of reusability-usability to minimize the ontology reuse effort in different applications. To achieve this balance, ontology design methods focus on designing layered ontologies that classify into abstraction layers the common domain knowledge (reused by most applications) and the variant domain knowledge (reused by specific application types). This classification is performed from scratch by domain experts and ontology engineers. Hence, the design of reusable and usable ontologies that represent complex domains takes a lot of effort. Considering how common and variant software features are classified when designing Software Product Lines (SPLs), we argue that SPL engineering techniques can facilitate the domain knowledge classification taking as reference existing ontologies. In this paper, we show the experiences of applying SPL and ontology design techniques in combination to design a reusable and usable global ontology for the energy domain. Domain experts and ontology engineers evaluated the proposed method. The results show that SPL engineering techniques enable a systematic and accurate domain knowledge classification, thus saving ontology design effort.