The Concept Difference for EL-Terminologies using Hypergraphs

Ontologies are used to represent and share knowledge. Numerous ontologies have been developed so far, especially in knowledge intensive areas such as the biomedical domain. As the size of ontologies increases, their continued development and maintenance is becoming more challenging as well. Detecting and representing semantic differences between versions of ontologies is an important task for which automated tool support is needed. In this paper we investigate the logical difference problem using a hypergraph representation of EL-terminologies. We focus solely on the concept difference wrt. a signature. For computing this difference it suffices to check the existence of simulations between hypergraphs whereas previous approaches required a combination of different methods.