Ontology module extraction for ontology reuse: an ontology engineering perspective

  • Authors:

  • Paul Doran;Valentina Tamma;Luigi Iannone

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Liverpool, Liverpool, United Kingdom;University of Liverpool, Liverpool, United Kingdom;University of Liverpool, Liverpool, United Kingdom

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the sixteenth ACM conference on Conference on information and knowledge management
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Problems resulting from the management of shared, distributed knowledge has led to ontologies being employed as a solution, in order to effectively integrate information across applications. This is dependent on having ways to share and reuse existing ontologies; with the increased availability of ontologies on the web, some of which include thousands of concepts, novel and more efficient methods for reuse are being devised. One possible way to achieve efficient ontology reuse is through the process of ontology module extraction. A novel approach to ontology module extraction is presented that aims to achieve more efficient reuse of very large ontologies; the motivation is drawn from an Ontology Engineering perspective. This paper provides a definition of ontology modules from the reuse perspective and an approach to module extraction based on such a definition. An abstract graph model for module extraction has been defined, along with a module extraction algorithm. The novel contribution of this paper is a module extraction algorithm that is independent of the language in which the ontology is expressed. This has been implemented in ModTool; a tool that produces ontology modules via extraction. Experiments were conducted to compare ModTool to other modularisation methods.