Boundary-based module extraction in weakly acyclic EL++ ontologies : theory foundation and preliminary evaluation

Modularization is a promising technique to meet the scalability challenge in reasoning with very large ontologies. In this work, we introduce a novel boundary-based modular extraction method for ontologies in weakly acyclic EL++ description logics. The proposed method is capable of identifying relevant axioms in an ontology based on the notion of boundaries of symbols, with respect to a given reasoning task. We present the theoretical foundation and a practical algorithm for computing boundary-based modules. The proposed algorithm is implemented for the weakly acyclic DL EL++. Experimental results on real-world ontologies show that boundarybased modules generated by our method are very close to the optimal result. -- Boundary ; modularization ; available interpretation ; axiom-based module