Modular Reuse of Ontologies: Theory and Practice

By Bernardo Cuenca Grau, Ian Horrocks, Yevgeny Kazakov, U. Sattler. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 2008

451 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this paper, we propose a set of tasks that are relevant for the modular reuse of ontologies. In order to formalize these tasks as reasoning problems, we introduce the notions of conservative extension, safety and module for a very general class of logic-based ontology languages. We investigate the general properties of and relationships between these notions and study the relationships between the relevant reasoning problems we have previously identified. To study the computability of these problems, we consider, in particular, Description Logics (DLs), which provide the formal underpinning of the W3C Web Ontology Language (OWL), and show that all the problems we consider are undecidable or algorithmically unsolvable for the description logic underlying OWL DL. In order to achieve a practical solution, we identify conditions sufficient for an ontology to reuse a set of symbols "safely"--that is, without changing their meaning. We provide the notion of a safety class, which characterizes any sufficient condition for safety, and identify a family of safety classes-called locality--which enjoys a collection of desirable properties. We use the notion of a safety class to extract modules from ontologies, and we provide various modularization algorithms that are appropriate to the properties of the particular safety class in use. Finally, we show practical benefits of our safety checking and module extraction algorithms.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Networks and Communications, Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6f1d6468460cf52d4d445f051cfadf6ce2ff728b

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Artificial Intelligence

1. Boris Motik
2. Ian Horrocks
3. Rob Shearer
4. U. Sattler
5. Bernardo Cuenca Grau
6. Birte Glimm
7. Peter F. Patel-Schneider
8. Ernesto Jiménez-Ruiz

In Computer Networks and Communications

1. Boris Motik
2. Rob Shearer
3. Ian Horrocks
4. U. Sattler
5. Natasha Noy

In Information Systems

1. Boris Motik
2. Ian Horrocks
3. Rob Shearer
4. U. Sattler
5. Natasha Noy
6. Sean Bechhofer

Citations in the corpus

• The DL-Lite Family and Relations (2009, unknown): “a certain vocabulary (see, e.g., Ghilardi, Lutz, & Wolter, 2006; Cuenca Grau, Horrocks, Kazakov, & Sattler, 2008; Kontchakov, Wolter, & Zakharyaschev, 2008).”
• A State-of-the-Art Review on the Integration of Building Information Modeling (BIM) and Geographic Information System (GIS) (2017, unknown): “The ultimate goal of semantic web is to “allow data to be shared effectively by wider communities, and to be processed automatically by tools as well as manually” [79].”
• HermiT: A Highly-Efficient OWL Reasoner (2008, methodology): “To simplify the ontology, we extracted a module (called GALEN-module1) from GALEN-full using the techniques from [4].”
• Hypertableau Reasoning for Description Logics (2009, methodology): “To simplify the ontology, we extracted a module (called GALEN-module1) from GALEN-full using the techniques from [17].”
• Ontologies and the semantic web (2006, background): “New reasoning services can be used both to alert developers to unanticipated and/or undesirable interactions when modules are integrated, and to identify a subset of the original ontology that is indistinguishable from it when used to reason about the relevant subset of the domain [4].”