Development of a Built Environment Ontology Lookup Service (BE-OLS) with a New Ontology Evaluation

Abstract: Recent years have seen a surge in development of formal ontologies within the domain of built environment. Yet, experts like novices face difficulties in locating relevant ontologies, hampering the use of ontologies. Besides, these ontologies demonstrate a range of development maturity. This highlights a gap: the need for a continuously updated repository to help users in discovering, evaluating and (re)using ontologies. This paper presents the Ontology Lookup Service for the Built Environment: BE-OLS, which allows to easily find and consult existing ontologies. It also enables researchers to find gaps or redundancies to help bring some order to the current state of the field.