Year: 2007
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: The ability to extract meaningful fragments from an ontology is key for ontology re-use. We propose a definition of a module that guarantees to completely capture the meaning of a given set of terms, i.e., to include all axioms relevant to the meaning of these terms, and study the problem of extracting minimal modules. We show that the problem of determining whether a subset of an ontology is a module for a given vocabulary is undecidable even for rather restricted sub-languages of OWL DL. Hence we propose two "approximations", i.e., alternative definitions of modules for a vocabulary that still provide the above guarantee, but that are possibly too strict, and that may thus result in larger modules: the first approximation is semantic and can be computed using existing DL reasoners; the second is syntactic, and can be computed in polynomial time. Finally, we report on an empirical evaluation of our syntactic approximation which demonstrates that the modules we extract are surprisingly small.
Institution: University of Manchester
Language: English
Topic: Semantic Web and Ontologies
Subfield: Artificial Intelligence
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2160522235