DeFind: A Protege Plugin for Computing Concept Definitions in EL Ontologies
This work addresses the need for ontology engineers and researchers in biomedical fields to efficiently compute and understand implicit concept definitions, though it is incremental as it builds on existing Description Logic EL frameworks.
The authors tackled the problem of discovering implicit concept definitions in EL ontologies by developing a Protege plugin that verifies if a concept can be defined using a user-specified vocabulary and provides explanations. The result is a tool that supports biomedical ontologies, which are commonly expressed in OWL 2 EL, by identifying and presenting logically implied definitions.
We introduce an extension to the Protege ontology editor, which allows for discovering concept definitions, which are not explicitly present in axioms, but are logically implied by an ontology. The plugin supports ontologies formulated in the Description Logic EL, which underpins the OWL 2 EL profile of the Web Ontology Language and despite its limited expressiveness captures most of the biomedical ontologies published on the Web. The developed tool allows to verify whether a concept can be defined using a vocabulary of interest specified by a user. In particular, it allows to decide whether some vocabulary items can be omitted in a formulation of a complex concept. The corresponding definitions are presented to the user and are provided with explanations generated by an ontology reasoner.