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History Matters: Incremental Ontology Reasoning Using Modules

Bernardo Cuenca Grau‚ Christian Halaschek−Wiener and Yevgeny Kazakov

Abstract

The development of ontologies involves continuous but relatively small modifications. Existing ontology reasoners, however, do not take advantage of the similarities between different versions of an ontology. In this paper, we propose a technique for incremental reasoning—that is, reasoning that reuses information obtained from previous versions of an ontology—based on the notion of a module. Our technique does not depend on a particular reasoning calculus and thus can be used in combination with any reasoner. We have applied our results to incremental classification of OWL DL ontologies and found significant improvement over regular classification time on a set of real-world ontologies.

Book Title
ISWC/ASWC
Pages
183−196
Publisher
Springer
Series
Lecture Notes in Computer Science
Volume
4825
Year
2007