Making Ontology Relationships Explicit in a Ontology Network.

The development of ontologies to the Semantic Web is based on the integration of existing ontologies favoring the modularization and reuse of them. These ontologies are used together in complex applications. However, how they are combined is usually hidden in the application code. The lack of an approach for explicitly expressing the way how ontologies are combined for a specific purpose, leads to think on ontology networks as a new ontology engineering concept. This paper formally defines the different relationships among the networked ontologies and shows how they can be modeled as an ontology network in a case study of the health domain.