Bridging Upper Ontology and Modular Ontology Modeling: a Tool and Evaluation: a Tool and Evaluation

Ontologies are increasingly used as schema for knowledge graphs in many application areas. As such, there are a variety of different approaches for their development. In this paper, we describe and evaluate UAO (for Upper Ontology Alignment Tool), which is an extension to CoModIDE, a graphical Protégé plugin for modular ontology modeling. UAO enables ontology engineers to combine modular ontology modeling with a more traditional ontology modeling approach based on upper ontologies. We posit – and our evaluation supports this claim – that the tool does indeed makes it easier to combine both approaches. Thus, UAO enables a best-of-both-worlds approach. The evaluation consists of a user study, and the results show that performing typical manual alignment modeling tasks is relatively easier with UAO than doing it with Protégé alone, in terms of the time required to complete the task and improving the correctness of the output. Additionally, our test subjects provided significantly higher ratings on the System Utilization Scale for UOA.