A general method for pruning OWL ontologies

Abstract

In the past, most ontologies have been developed essentially from scratch, but in the last decade several research projects have appeared that use large ontologies to create new ontologies in a semiautomatic (or assisted) way. When using a large ontology to create a more specific one, a key aspect is to delete, as much automatically as possible, the elements of the large ontology that are irrelevant for the specific domain. This activity is commonly performed by a pruning method. There are several approaches for pruning ontologies, and they differ in the kind of ontology that they prune and the way the relevant concepts are selected and identified. This paper adapts an existing pruning method to OWL ontologies, and extends it to deal with the instances of the ontology to prune. Furthermore, different ways of selecting relevant concepts are studied. The method has been implemented. We illustrate the method by applying it to a case study that prunes a spatial ontology based on the Cyc ontology. © Springer-Verlag 2004.