Ontology View Extraction: An Approach Based on Ontological Meta-properties

Ontologies have been applied in Computer Science to ensure the semantic interoperability among multiple systems. With the increasing of ontologies availability, many approaches for promoting the share and reuse of ontologies have been investigated in recent years, like ontology module extraction (modularization) and ontology view extraction. Approaches for ontology module extraction are used for extracting modules in large ontologies. On the other hand, ontology views have been used for providing to the user only the parts of the ontology that are useful for a given task. Thus, both ontology views and ontology modules encapsulate a subset of the original ontology, but they have different purposes. The literature has explored the ontological meta-properties (such as identity and rigidity) for guiding the modeling decisions that are made during the ontology engineering process. Some of these meta-properties were formalized in foundational ontologies like UFO (Unified foundational ontology). In this paper, we explore the use of ontological meta-properties for extracting ontology views. We propose a characterization of the notion of well-founded ontology view, considering the ontological meta-properties of the concepts. Besides that, we also propose a language-independent algorithm for sub-ontology extraction that is guided by ontological meta-properties. Finally, we present a case study for illustrating the application of our approach.