FONTE: A Protégé Plug-in for Engineering Complex Ontologies

Humans have a natural ability to reason about scenarios including spatial and temporal information but for several reasons the process of developing complex ontologies including time and/or space is still not well developed and it remains an one-off, labour intensive experience. In this paper we present Fonte (Factorising ONTology Engineering complexity), an ontology engineering methodology that relies on a divide and conquer strategy. The targeted complex ontology is built by assembling modular ontologies that capture temporal, spatial and domain (atemporal and aspatial) aspects. In order to support the proposed methodology we developed a plug-in for Protege.