Common Ontologies

A common ontology, also known as meta-ontology or higher-level ontology, is an ontology that is created to integrate ontologies across domains in order to support some common purpose.

In this sense, a common ontology has the potential to achieve interoperability across domains and encapsulate the fragmented knowledge, captured by the different ontologies, under a unified ontological framework.

In the AIM@SHAPE network, the common goal is the ability to reason, to re-use existing knowledge and to extend and create new knowledge about shape resources and tools.

In essence, the common ontologies integrate all the metadata information from the Shapes Repository, and the Tools Repository. The primary goal is thus to provide an ontology-driven specification for objects representing a shape or a tool, including other helpful information (like information related to the creation of a resource, usability information, etc.) as well.

In a specific domain, captured by a particular ontology, a shape or a tool is expected to have this common metadata information and potentially some domain-specific metadata information as well.