Cost benefits of ontologies

Given the state-of-the-art in ontological engineering, we still lack costing models for software projects that adopt reusable ontological libraries. However, we can find such costing models in the standard software engineering literature. The COCOMO-II software cost estimation model offers an estimate of the cost of adapting reusable sub-routines for a new project [Abts, Clark, Devnani-Chulani, Horowitz, Madachy, Reifer, Selby & Steece 1998, p21]. A learning curve must be traversed before a module can be adapted. By the time you know enough to change a little of that module, 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1