Summary
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.
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Cuenca Grau, B., Horrocks, I., Kazakov, Y., Sattler, U. (2009). Extracting Modules from Ontologies: A Logic-Based Approach. In: Stuckenschmidt, H., Parent, C., Spaccapietra, S. (eds) Modular Ontologies. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5445. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-01907-4_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-01907-4_8
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