Track: Semantic Web
Paper Title:
Just the Right Amount: Extracting Modules from Ontologies
Authors:
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 minimally sized modules.
We show that the problem of deciding if a module is minimal 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 checked 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 that
demonstrates that the modules we extract are surprisingly small.
