Creating Signature-Based Views for Description Logic Ontologies with Transitivity and Qualified Number Restrictions

Developing ontologies for the Semantic Web is a time-consuming and error-prone task that typically requires the investment of considerable manpower and resources, as well as collaborative efforts. A potentially better idea is to reuse the “off-the-shelf” ontologies, whenever possible, somehow as per certain demands and requirements. A promising way to achieve ontology reuse is through creating views of ontologies, analogous to creating views of databases, with the resulting views focusing on specific topics and content of the original ontologies. This paper explores the problem of creating views of ontologies using a uniform interpolation approach. In particular, we develop a novel and practical uniform interpolation method for creating signature-based views for ontologies specified in the description logic , a very expressive description logic for which uniform interpolation has not been fully addressed. The method is terminating and sound, and computes uniform interpolants of -ontologies by eliminating from the input ontologies the names not used in the view using a forgetting procedure. This makes it the first and so far the only approach to eliminate both concept and (non-transitive) role names from -ontologies. Despite the inherent difficulty of uniform interpolation for this level of expressivity, an empirical evaluation with a prototypical implementation show very good success rates on a corpus of real-world ontologies, and demonstrates clear algorithmic advantage over the state-of-the-art system LETHE. This is extremely useful from the semantic web perspective, as it provides knowledge engineers with a powerful tool to create views of ontologies for ontology reuse.