Ontology Module Extraction

Ontology Module Extraction

The goal of the ontology partitioning plugin is to support the user in decomposing an ontology into smaller, more manageable modules with appropriate dependencies. It takes the form of a view within the environment of the NeOn toolkit, which allows the user to select the ontology to modularize, specify some parameters for the partitioning algorithm and execute this algorithm. The result of the algorithm is then presented as a a graph showing the dependencies and the related size of the created modules, as well as a textual description of the content of each module. The user can then save the whole modularization as a set of ontologies connected to each other through import links, or change to parameters to obtain a more suitable partition. Modules created from this plugin being ontologies, they can then be further tweaked using the module composition or the module extraction plugins.

The ontology partitioning plugin is useful mainly when reengineering existing ontological resources, making them more manageable and therefore more reusable in other ontologies. It can also be consider as an ontology re-factoring mechanisms.