=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-500/paper-10
|storemode=property
|title=Structure-based Analysis and Modularization of Ontologies
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-500/paper10.pdf
|volume=Vol-500
}}
==Structure-based Analysis and Modularization of Ontologies==
<pdf width="1500px">https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-500/paper10.pdf</pdf>
<pre>
Structure-based Analysis and Modularization of
                 Ontologies

                                 Gökhan Coskun

                              Freie Universität Berlin
                              coskun@inf.fu-berlin.de

    Component-based development of large and complex software systems by
small well defined building blocks improves the comprehension as well as the
management and leads to reusable software modules and a scalable overall sys-
tem. Accordingly, designing ontologies in a modular way is intuitively promising
in order to benefit from the same advantages. However, the state of the art
in ontology engineering is the usage of monolithic ontologies. For that reason
the number as well as the size of available ontologies has increased with the
growing utilization during the last years. In order to improve the efficient usage
(e.g. through scoped reasoning for reasoners), to simplify the maintenance (e.g.
through refactoring support) and to allow reusable components (e.g. through in-
creased human understandability) there is a need to modularize large ontologies
into well-sized building blocks in a (semi-) automatic way. Especially from the
viewpoint of the Semantic Web reusability is a crucial issue because an agreed
common semantic model allows easy data integration and interoperability.
    Considering ontologies as networks of concepts connected through properties,
network analysis techniques are a promising approach to evaluate and modular-
ize ontologies. As a very well established discipline in science there are a lot
of sophisticated methods and tools for network analysis available. We believe
that these methods can be modified and applied to ontologies, so that the ontol-
ogy structure can be used to analyze the content and to identify regions, which
can be seen as network “communities” and can be extracted as modules. Fur-
thermore, we are convinced that structure analysis enables a first evaluation of
the usability by allowing different views, so that existing ontologies can be easier
comprehended by ontology engineers. This is very important because refactoring
and reusing of existing models assume that these models are understood.
    This work investigates on how network analysis techniques and network mea-
sures (e.g. node centrality, betweenness, density, similarity) can be applied to
ontologies and aims at gaining insight to which extent structure based tech-
niques can be modified so they are paying attention to the semantics inherent
in ontologies. The expected contribution is a method and tool support for ontol-
ogy engineers to analyze and modularize ontologies in a (semi-) automatic way.
The main goal is to improve the usability and maintainability by increasing the
understandability and allowing ontology engineers to refactor and reuse existing
ontologies easily.

</pre>