A normal form for hypergraph-based module extraction for SROIQ

Abstract

Modularization is an important part of the modular design and maintenance of large scale ontologies. Syntactic locality modules, with their desirable model theoretic properties, play an ever increasing role in the design of algorithms for modularization, partitioning and reasoning tasks such as classification. It has been shown that, for the DL EL+, the syntactic locality module extraction problem is equivalent to the reachability problem for hypergraphs. In this paper we investigate and introduce a normal form for the DL SROIQ which allows us to map any SROIQ ontology to an equivalent hypergraph. We then show that standard hyperpath search algorithms can be used to extract modules similar to syntactic locality modules for SROIQ ontologies.