Summary
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.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Baader, F., Brandt, S., Lutz, C.: Pushing the \(\mathcal{EL}\) envelope. In: Proc. IJCAI 2005, pp. 364–370 (2005)
Baader, F., Calvanese, D., McGuinness, D.L., Nardi, D., Patel-Schneider, P.F. (eds.): The Description Logic Handbook: Theory, Implementation, and Applications. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2003)
Börger, E., Grädel, E., Gurevich, Y.: The Classical Decision Problem. In: Perspectives of Mathematical Logic. Springer, Heidelberg (1997); Second printing (Universitext) 2001
Cuenca Grau, B., Horrocks, I., Kazakov, Y., Sattler, U.: A logical framework for modularity of ontologies. In: Proc. IJCAI 2007, pp. 298–304 (2007)
Cuenca Grau, B., Horrocks, I., Kutz, O., Sattler, U.: Will my Ontologies Fit Together? In: Proc. DL 2006 (2006)
Cuenca Grau, B., Parsia, B., Sirin, E., Kalyanpur, A.: Modularity and Web Ontologies. In: Proc. KR 2006, pp. 198–209 (2006)
Ghilardi, S., Lutz, C., Wolter, F.: Did I Damage my Ontology? A Case for Conservative Extensions in Description Logics. In: Proc. KR 2006, pp. 187–197 (2006)
Cuenca Grau, B., Halaschek-Wiener, C., Kazakov, Y.: History matters: Incremental ontology reasoning using modules. In: Aberer, K., Choi, K.-S., Noy, N., Allemang, D., Lee, K.-I., Nixon, L., Golbeck, J., Mika, P., Maynard, D., Mizoguchi, R., Schreiber, G., Cudré-Mauroux, P. (eds.) ASWC 2007 and ISWC 2007. LNCS, vol. 4825, pp. 183–196. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
Horrocks, I., Patel-Schneider, P.F., van Harmelen, F.: From \(\mathcal{SHIQ}\) and RDF to OWL: The making of a web ontology language. J. of Web Semantics 1(1), 7–26 (2003)
Horrocks, I., Sattler, U.: A tableaux decision procedure for SHOIQ. In: Proc. of the IJCAI. Morgan Kaufman, San Francisco (2005)
Kalyanpur, A., Parsia, B., Sirin, E., Cuenca Grau, B., Hendler, J.: SWOOP: A web editing browser. Elsevier’s Journal Of Web Semantics 4(2), 144–153 (2006)
Lutz, C., Walther, D., Wolter, F.: Conservative extensions in expressive description logics. In: Proc. of IJCAI 2007, pp. 453–459 (2007)
Möller, R., Haarslev, V.: Description logic systems. In: The Description Logic Handbook, ch. 8, pp. 282–305. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2003)
Motik, B.: Reasoning in Description Logics using Resolution and Deductive Databases. PhD thesis, Univesität Karlsruhe (TH), Karlsruhe, Germany (2006)
Noy, N.F., Musen, M.A.: The PROMPT suite: Interactive tools for ontology mapping and merging. Int. Journal of Human-Computer Studies 6(59) (2003)
Patel-Schneider, P.F., Hayes, P., Horrocks, I.: Web ontology language OWL Abstract Syntax and Semantics. W3C Recommendation (2004)
Schmidt-Schauß, M., Smolka, G.: Attributive concept descriptions with complements. Artif. Intell. 48(1), 1–26 (1991)
Sirin, E., Parsia, B.: Pellet system description. In: Proc. DL 2004 (2004)
Tsarkov, D., Horrocks, I.: FaCT++ description logic reasoner: System description. In: Furbach, U., Shankar, N. (eds.) IJCAR 2006. LNCS, vol. 4130, pp. 292–297. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Cuenca Grau, B., Horrocks, I., Kazakov, Y., Sattler, U. (2009). Extracting Modules from Ontologies: A Logic-Based Approach. In: Stuckenschmidt, H., Parent, C., Spaccapietra, S. (eds) Modular Ontologies. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5445. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-01907-4_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-01907-4_8
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-01906-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-01907-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)