Research On The Construction Of Modular Ontology

Ontology, which provides share semantic for different systems, is a hot topic of IT research in these years. The construction of ontologies, including development and evolution, is the basis of ontologies' application. Because of lack of reusing in development, and the versioning mechanism for evolution of ontologies is not practical, and be short of a general evaluation system for ontologies, the existing construction of ontologies is not effective, the quality of resulting ontologies are not controllable, and are very hard to be maintained.Modularization, which encapsulates details and facilitates reusing and concurrent developing, has get big success in many mature engineering domains such as software engineering and machinery engineering. This article introduces modularization into ontology in order to improve the construction of ontologies.As the foundation of discussion, this article firstly elaborates some relating basic concepts, such as ontology module, modular ontology, module tree, relation-bridge net and so on, and then proposes formalized techniques to represent modular ontology, including OWL-MO ontology which is compatible with the existing ontology languages and ontology editors, and a new modular ontology language named MOWL. Also, this article provides a two-step Tableaux automatic algorithm which could elevate the efficiency of ontology reasoning.After analyzing of the limitation of nowadays ontology engineering and the semi-automatic methods of ontology development, this article suggests the modular ontology engineering and the semi-automatic methods for the development of modular ontology. The former emphasizes on the reusing of ontology module and thus provides some guide line for the development of ontology module in order to improve the reusability of ontology module, while the later focus on the semi-automatic decomposition of sub-domain and semi-...