; when we could partially salvage existing knowledge, it had to be re-written
&gt; in a way that would facilitate the specific needs of our project, and this
&gt; took practically as much time as creating everything afresh.  (True, some of
&gt; the upper ontology terms were more reusable, but also less relevant).  


I'm not quite sure that I understand the first two sentences in section 2.  
Regarding re-use, of course, you're correct that there is a lot of different
knowledge that will be germane to a