The ability to efficiently and effectively reuse ontologies is commonly acknowledged to play a crucial role in the large scale dissemination of ontologies and ontology-driven technology, being thus a pre-requisite for the ongoing realization of the Semantic Web. In this article, we give an account of ontology reuse from a process point of view. We present a methodology that can be utilized to systematize and monitor ontology engineering processes in scenarios reusing available ontological knowledge in the context of a particular application. Notably, and by contrast to existing approaches in this field, our aim is to provide means to overcome the poor reusability of existing resources — rather than to solve the more general issue of building new, more reusable knowledge components. To do so we investigate the impact of the application context of an ontology — in terms of tasks this ontology has been created for and will be utilized in — has on the feasibility of a reuse-oriented ontology development strategy and provide guidelines that take these aspects into account. The applicability of the methodology is demonstrated through a case study performed in collaboration with an international eRecruitment solution provider.
