Modular reuse of ontologies: Theory and practice (original) (raw)
Related papers
2012
In the past 10 years, modularity has been established as a central research topic in ontology engineering. Several approaches and techniques have been investigated and developed in detail to characterise and deal with modularity (Stuckenschmidt et al., 2009). Theoretical as well as practical aspects of modularity have become essential to the design of ontologies. They aim at reducing complexity, improving maintenance, and support reasoning over modules (Kutz et al., 2010).
Modular ontology languages revisited
Proc. of the Workshop on Semantic Web for …, 2007
In this paper, we compare various formalisms that have been recently introduced or used for distributed reasoning, ontology integration, and related topics; in particular, we focus on E-connections, Distributed Description Logics, and Package-based Description Logics. We then establish the relationship between these formalisms and various nonstandard reasoning services that have been recently proposed for assisting the modeler in ontology integration and knowledge reuse tasks, such as locality of an ontology and conservative extensions.
A logical framework for modular integration of ontologies
Proc. of the 20th Int. Joint Conf …, 2007
Modularity is a key requirement for collaborative ontology engineering and for distributed ontology reuse on the Web. Modern ontology languages, such as OWL, are logic-based, and thus a useful notion of modularity needs to take the semantics of ontologies and their implications into account. We propose a logic-based notion of modularity that allows the modeler to specify the external signature of their ontology, whose symbols are assumed to be defined in some other ontology. We define two restrictions on the usage of the external signature, a syntactic and a slightly less restrictive, semantic one, each of which is decidable and guarantees a certain kind of "black-box" behavior, which enables the controlled merging of ontologies. Analysis of real-world ontologies suggests that these restrictions are not too onerous.
An approach for ontology modularization
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2009
Ontology modularization could help overcome the problem of defining a fragment of an existing ontology to be reused, in order to enable ontology developers to include only those concepts and relations that are relevant for the application they are modeling an ontology for. This paper presents a concrete tool that incorporates an approach to ontology modularization that inherits some of the main principles from object-oriented software engineering, which are encapsulation and information hiding. What motivated us to track that direction is the fact that most ontology approaches to the problem focus on linking ontologies rather than building modules that can encapsulate foreign parts of ontologies(or other modules) that can be managed more easily.
Modular Ontologies-a Formal Investigation of Semantics and Expressivity
The Semantic WebASWC 2006, 2006
With the growing interest in modular ontology languages to address the need for collaborative development, integration, and use of ontologies on the Web, there is an urgent need for a common framework for comparing modular ontology language proposals on the basis of criteria such as their semantic soundness and expressive power. We introduce an Abstract Modular Ontology (AMO) language and offer precise definitions of semantic soundness such as localized semantics and exact reasoning, and expressivity requirements for modular ontology languages. We compare Distributed Description Logics (DDL), E -connections, and Package-Based Description Logics (P-DL) with respect to these criteria. Our analysis suggests that by relaxing the strong domain disjointedness assumption adopted in DDL and E -connection, as P-DL demonstrated, it is possible to overcome some known semantic difficulties and expressivity limitations of DDL and E -Connections.
Integrity and change in modular ontologies
2003
The benefits of modular representations arc well known from many areas of computer science. In this paper, we concentrate on the benefits of modular ontologies with respect to local containment of terminological reasoning. We define an architecture for modular ontologies that supports local reasoning by compiling implied subsumption relations. We further address the problem of guaranteeing the integrity of a modular ontology in the presence of local changes. We propose a strategy for analyzing changes and guiding the process of updating compiled information.
Reasoning and change management in modular ontologies
Data & Knowledge Engineering, 2007
The benefits of modular representations are well known from many areas of computer science. In this paper, we concentrate on the benefits of modular ontologies with respect to local containment of terminological reasoning. We define an architecture for modular ontologies that supports local reasoning by compiling implied subsumption relations. We further address the problem of guaranteeing the integrity of a modular ontology in the presence of local changes. We propose a strategy for analyzing changes and guiding the process of updating compiled information.
The Modular Structure of an Ontology: Atomic Decomposition towards Applications
dcs.bbk.ac.uk
Modularity in ontologies Modern ontologies can get quite large as well as complex, which poses challenges to tools and users when it comes to processing, editing, analyzing them, or reusing their parts. This suggests that exploiting modularity of ontologies might be fruitful, and research into this topic has been an active area for ontology engineering. Much recent effort has gone into developing logically sensible modules, that is, parts of an ontology which offer strong logical guarantees for intuitive modular properties. One such guarantee is called coverage. It means that a module captures all the ontology's knowledge about a given set of terms (signature). A module in this sense is a subset of an ontology's axioms that provides coverage for a signature, and each possible signature determines such a module. The minimal modules to provide coverage for a signature are those based on Conservative Extensions (CEs) , that are however not feasible to be computed for many expressive languages. Modules based on syntactic locality [5] also provide coverage because they are efficiently computable approximations of CEs; however, such modules are not in general minimal.