The summary abox: cutting ontologies down to size

• Authors: Achille Fokoue;Aaron Kershenbaum;Li Ma;Edith Schonberg;Kavitha Srinivas
• Venue: ISWC'06 Proceedings of the 5th international conference on The Semantic Web
• Year: 2006

Reasoning on OWL ontologies is known to be intractable in the worst-case, which is a serious problem because in practice, most OWL ontologies have large Aboxes, i.e., numerous assertions about individuals and their relations. We propose a technique that uses a summary of the ontology (summary Abox) to reduce reasoning to a small subset of the original Abox, and prove that our techniques are sound and complete. We demonstrate the scalability of this technique for consistency detection in 4 ontologies, the largest of which has 6.5 million role assertions.