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Reusing ontologies for new purposes, or adapting them to new use-cases, is frequently difficult. In our experiences, we have found this to be the case for several reasons: (i) differing representational granularity in ontologies and in use-cases, (ii) lacking conceptual clarity in potentially reusable ontologies, (iii) lack and difficulty of adherence to good modeling principles, and (iv) a lack of reuse emphasis and process support available in ontology engineering tooling. In order to address these concerns, we have developed the Modular Ontology Modeling (MOMo) methodology, and its supporting tooling infrastructure, CoModIDE (the Comprehensive Modular Ontology IDE– “commodity”). MOMo builds on the established eXtreme Design methodology, and like it emphasizes modular development and design pattern reuse; but crucially adds the extensive use of graphical schema diagrams, and tooling that support them, as vehicles for knowledge elicitation from experts. In this paper, we present the MOMo workflow in detail, and describe several useful resources for executing it. In particular, we provide a thorough and rigorous evaluation of CoModIDE in its role of supporting the MOMo methodology’s graphical modeling paradigm. We find that CoModIDE significantly improves approachability of such a paradigm, and that it displays a high usability.

In this article we outline the details of an ontology, called SmartEnv, proposed as a representational model to assist the development process of smart (i.e., sensorized) environments. The SmartEnv ontology is described in terms of its modules representing different aspects including physical and conceptual aspects of a smart environment. We propose the use of the Ontology Design Pattern (ODP) paradigm in order to modularize our proposed solution, while at the same time avoiding strong dependencies between the modules in order to manage the representational complexity of the ontology. The ODP paradigm and related methodologies enable incremental construction of ontologies by first creating and then linking small modules. Most modules (patterns) of the SmartEnv ontology are inspired by, and aligned with, the Semantic Sensor Network (SSN) ontology, however with extra interlinks to provide further precision and cover more representational aspects. The result is a network of 8 ontology patterns together forming a generic representation for a smart environment. The patterns have been submitted to the ODP portal and are available on-line at stable URIs.