Abstract
The Atomic Decomposition of an ontology is a succinct representation of the logic-based modules in that ontology. Ultimately, it reveals the modular structure of the ontology. Atomic Decompositions appear to be useful for both user and non-user facing services. For example, they can be used for ontology comprehension and to facilitate reasoner optimisation. In this article we investigate claims about the practicality of computing Atomic Decompositions for naturally occurring ontologies. We do this by performing a replication study using an off-the-shelf Atomic Decomposition algorithm implementation on three large test corpora of OWL ontologies. Our findings indicate that (a) previously published empirical studies in this area are repeatable and verifiable; (b) computing Atomic Decompositions in the vast majority of cases is practical in that it can be performed in less than 30 seconds in 90% of cases, even for ontologies containing hundreds of thousands of axioms; (c) there are occurrences of extremely large ontologies (< 1% in our test corpora) where the polynomial runtime behaviour of the Atomic Decomposition algorithm begins to bite and computations cannot be completed within 12-hours of CPU time; (d) the distribution of number of atoms in the Atomic Decomposition for an ontology appears to be similar for distinct corpora.
Chapter PDF
References
Baader, F., Brandt, S., Lutz, C.: Pushing the \(\mathcal{EL}\) envelope. In: Proceedings of IJCAI (2005)
Horrocks, I., Kutz, O., Sattler, U.: The even more irresistible \(\mathcal{SROIQ}\). In: Proceedings of KR 2006 (2006)
Horrocks, I., Patel-Schneider, P.F., van Harmelen, F.: From \(\mathcal{SHIQ}\) and RDF to OWL: The making of a web ontology language. J. of Web Semantics 1(1), 7–26 (2003)
Matentzoglu, N., Bail, S., Parsia, B.: A snapshot of the OWL Web. In: Alani, H., et al. (eds.) ISWC 2013, Part I. LNCS, vol. 8218, pp. 331–346. Springer, Heidelberg (2013)
Motik, B., Patel-Schneider, P.F., Parsia, B.: OWL 2 Web Ontology Language structural specification and functional style syntax. Technical report, W3C – World Wide Web Consortium (October 2009)
Noy, N.F., Shah, N.H., Whetzel, P.L., Dai, B., Dorf, M.V., Griffith, N., Jonquet, C., Rubin, D.L., Storey, M.-A., Chute, C.G., Musen, M.A.: BioPortal: Ontologies and integrated data resources at the click of a mouse. Nucleic Acids Research 37 (May 2009)
Suntisrivaraporn, B.: Polynomial-Time Reasoning Support for Design and Maintenance of Large-Scale Biomedical Ontologies. PhD thesis, T.U. Dresden (2009)
Tsarkov, D.: Improved algorithms for module extraction and atomic decomposition. In: Proceedings of DL 2012 (2012)
Tsarkov, D., Palmisano, I.: Chainsaw: a metareasoner for large ontologies. In: Proceedings of ORE 2012 (2012)
Del Vescovo, C.: The Modular Structure of an Ontology: Atomic Decomposition and its applications. PhD thesis, The University of Manchester (2013)
Del Vescovo, C., Gessler, D.D.G., Klinov, P., Parsia, B., Sattler, U., Schneider, T., Winget, A.: Decomposition and modular structure of BioPortal ontologies. In: Aroyo, L., Welty, C., Alani, H., Taylor, J., Bernstein, A., Kagal, L., Noy, N., Blomqvist, E. (eds.) ISWC 2011, Part I. LNCS, vol. 7031, pp. 130–145. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Horridge, M., Mortensen, J.M., Parsia, B., Sattler, U., Musen, M.A. (2014). A Study on the Atomic Decomposition of Ontologies. In: Mika, P., et al. The Semantic Web – ISWC 2014. ISWC 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8797. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11915-1_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11915-1_5
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-11914-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-11915-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)