Extracting Modules from Ontologies: A Logic−Based Approach

Book

The ability to extract meaningful fragments from an ontology is essential for ontology reuse. 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. We show that the problem of determining whether a subset of an ontology is a module for a given vocabulary is undecidable even for OWL DL. Given these negative results, we propose sufficient conditions for a for a fragment of an ontology to be a module. We propose an algorithm for computing modules based on those conditions and present our experimental results on a set of real-world ontologies of varying size and complexity.

Authors: Grau, B; Horrocks, I; Kazakov, Y; Sattler, U

• Host title: Modular Ontologies
• Pages: 159-186
• Publication date: 2009-01-01
• ISBN: 9783642019067