Extract ABox Modules for Efficient Ontology Querying
This addresses efficiency in ontology querying for knowledge representation systems, though it is incremental as it builds on existing module extraction concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of tractable querying over ontologies with large ABoxes by proposing a formal definition of ABox modules that preserve facts about individuals, enabling independent reasoning. Evaluation shows that extracted modules are significantly smaller than the entire ABox, improving reasoning time.
The extraction of logically-independent fragments out of an ontology ABox can be useful for solving the tractability problem of querying ontologies with large ABoxes. In this paper, we propose a formal definition of an ABox module, such that it guarantees complete preservation of facts about a given set of individuals, and thus can be reasoned independently w.r.t. the ontology TBox. With ABox modules of this type, isolated or distributed (parallel) ABox reasoning becomes feasible, and more efficient data retrieval from ontology ABoxes can be attained. To compute such an ABox module, we present a theoretical approach and also an approximation for $\mathcal{SHIQ}$ ontologies. Evaluation of the module approximation on different types of ontologies shows that, on average, extracted ABox modules are significantly smaller than the entire ABox, and the time for ontology reasoning based on ABox modules can be improved significantly.