Just the Right Amount: Extracting Modules from Ontologies
Authors:
Bernardo Cuenca Grau (University of Manchester)
Ian Horrocks (University of Manchester)
Yevgeny Kazakov (University of Manchester)
Ulrike Sattler (University of Manchester)
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.
Slot:
Shaughnessy, Saturday, May 12, 2007, 10:30am to 12 noon.