Quality assurance of ontology content reuse

Building ontologies is difficult and time-consuming. As such, content reuse has been promoted as an important guiding principle in ontology development. Reusing content from other ontologies can reduce the overall effort involved in new ontology construction and provide better alignment with existing knowledge modeling. However, reuse is not a panacea, and it comes with its own attendant difficulties. In this paper, we investigate some common quality assurance issues associated with reuse, such as duplicated content and versioning problems. Some heuristic-based approaches are proposed for analyzing ontologies for these kinds of quality assurance issues. An analysis is carried out on a sample of the large collection of BioPortal-hosted ontologies, many of which employ reuse. The findings indicate that curators and authors, particularly those new to the reuse process, should be on the alert when developing an ontology with reused content to avoid introducing problems into their own ontologies.