Module extraction and incremental classification: A pragmatic approach for ε ℒ+ ontologies

Abstract

The description logic has recently proved practically useful in the life science domain with presence of several large-scale biomedical ontologies such as Snomed ct. To deal with ontologies of this scale, standard reasoning of classification is essential but not sufficient. The ability to extract relevant fragments from a large ontology and to incrementally classify it has become more crucial to support ontology design, maintenance and re-use. In this paper, we propose a pragmatic approach to module extraction and incremental classification for ontologies and report on empirical evaluations of our algorithms which have been implemented as an extension of the CEL reasoner. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.