Towards Semantic Summaries over Ontologies

Abstract

Industry is increasingly dependent on the gathering and processing of data to support crucial product development activities. However, support systems for engineers or computer scientists may need to consider terabytes of data, making it very hard to automatically extract useful information. Querying data repositories in order to extract just the right information for the situation at hand remains a challenging problem. We propose a notion of semantic summaries on top of description logic knowledge bases that supports querying and summarizing information in large (ontological) data repositories. The idea of a semantic summary is to characterize the result set from a broader perspective, instead of describing each domain object. We show that our summarization approach scales for benchmark ontologies up to several million assertional axioms.