Towards Use of OntoClean for Ontology Contextualization

Abstract

Ontologies are formal systems of concepts used to describe numerous domains of interest. Ontologies are usually very expressive, but it comes at a price of computationally expensive reasoning over them. In our previous work we discussed the possible performance benefits that can be obtained by decomposing an ontology into contexts. While the benefits are appealing, we discovered that, in our case, the main obstacle against using contextual versions of ontologies was the necessity of performing the costly process of their decomposition with the participation of human experts. In this paper we discuss the possibility of using OntoClean method for streamlining and at least partial automation of suggesting a decomposition of an ontology into contexts. We present a hypothesis about how to build a structure of contexts, and verify this hypothesis against several ontologies used in state-of-the-art research. The ontologies have been obtained by us in the process that uses elements of Systematic Literature Review. The final assessment of the method has been performed by human experts, during interviews, and we present the details of their evaluation in the paper.