Semantic Web Dog Food

Presented at: 3rd OWL: Experiences and Directions Workshop (OWLED2007)

by Bernardo Cuenca Grau, Ian Horrocks, Yevgeny Kazakov, Ulrike Sattler

The ability to extract meaningful fragments from an ontology is essential 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 minimal modules. We show that the problem of determining whether a subset of an ontology is a module for a given vocabulary is undecidable for OWL DL. Hence we propose sufficient conditions for an ontology to be a module: if an ontology satisfies our conditions then we can guarantee that it is a module, but not vice-versa. The conditions we present can be checked in polynomial time for OWL DL ontologies. We present our experimental results on a set of real-world ontologies of varying size and complexity. We show that the modules we obtain are much smaller than the ones computed using existing techniques.

Keywords: Description Logics, Ontologies, Semantic Web, Web Ontology Language

Resource URI on the dog food server: http://data.semanticweb.org/conference/owled/2007/paper-4

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