MIREOT: The minimum information to reference an external ontology term

Abstract

While the Web Ontology Language (OWL) provides a mechanism to import ontologies, this mechanism is not always suitable. Current editing tools present challenges for working with large ontologies and direct OWL imports can prove impractical for day-to-day development. Furthermore, external ontologies often undergo continuous change which can introduce conflicts when integrated with multiple efforts. Finally, importing heterogeneous ontologies in their entirety may lead to inconsistencies or unintended inferences. In this paper we propose a set of guidelines for importing required terms from an external resource into a target ontology. We describe the methodology, its implementation, present some examples of this application, and outline future work and extensions.