Efficient Projection of Ontologies

Abstract

Abstract. In collaborative and interoperable information systems it is frequently necessary to export a subset of an ontology, in particular to export all instances and axioms subsumed by a shared domain ontology. Technically this can be realized by projecting the Abox axioms of the private instances to the vocabulary of the shared ontology using a reasoner. We show that the direct application of this method results in a very redundant export. Therefore, we propose methods to generate a much smaller equivalent export in an efficient way. These methods are based on a deep analysis of properties of axiom sets that can be used to efficiently filter redundancies during the export process and provide methods to further minimize redundancies in the result. We evaluate the performance and the degree of minimality that can be reached with our approach with standard benchmarking ontologies with large Aboxes and a use case of the bio-medical domain.