Module Extraction and Incremental Classification: A Pragmatic Approach for EL+ Ontologies
Proceedings of the 5th European Semantic Web Conference, Berlin, Heidelberg, Springer Verlag, (June 2008)Abstract
The description logic EL+ has recently proved practically useful in the life science domain with presence of several large-scale biomedical ontologies such as SNOMED CT. To deal with ontologies of this scale, standard reasoning of classification is essential but not sufficient. The ability to extract relevant fragments from a large ontology and to incrementally classify it has become more crucial to support ontology design, maintenance and re-use. In this paper, we propose a pragmatic approach to module extraction and incremental classification for EL+ ontologies and report on empirical evaluations of our algorithms which have been implemented as an extension of the CEL reasoner.