Designing metadata with existing application ontologies

Among various metadata design difficulties, 1) designing subsumption relation of two classes, 2) designing diverse properties of a given class, and 3) determining whether an item should be designed as class or property, are three common difficulties faced by human designers. We devised a metadata referring method, which provides example-based design information by organizing existing metadata defined in multiple ontologies in table formats. Our referring method provides 1) existing class hierarchy definitions, 2) similar and specific property definitions, and 3) overviews of class hierarchy and property definitions of a given class, after searching through numerous application ontologies. An evaluation experiment has revealed that our method is useful in design difficulties 1) and 2), but not in 3).