Categorization power of ontologies with respect to focus classes

Abstract

When reusing existing ontologies, preference might be given to those providing extensive subcategorization for the classes deemed important in the new ontology (focus classes). The reused set of categories may not only consist of named classes but also of some compound concept expressions that could be viewed as meaningful categories by human ontologist. We define the general notion of focused ontologistic categorization power; for the sake of tractable experiments we then choose a restricted concept expression language and map it to syntactic axiom patterns. The occurrence of the patterns has been verified in two ontology collections, and for a sample of pattern instances their ontologistic status has been assessed by different groups of users.