University of Oxford Logo University of OxfordDepartment of Computer Science - Home

Extracting Modules from Ontologies: A Logic−Based Approach

Bernardo Cuenca Grau‚ Ian Horrocks‚ Yevgeny Kazakov and Ulrike Sattler

Abstract

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.

Details

Book Title

Modular Ontologies

Editor

Heiner Stuckenschmidt and Christine Parent and Stefano Spaccapietra

ISBN

978−3−642−01906−7

Pages

159−186

Publisher

Springer

Series

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

Volume

5445

Year

2009

Links

BibTeX

Link

ISBN (978-3-642-01906-7)

Related pages

People

Activities