Extracting modules from ontologies: A logic-based approach

Abstract

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. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.